BlackBerry (film)

BlackBerry is a 2023 Canadian biographical comedy-drama film directed by Matt Johnson from a script by Johnson and producer Matthew Miller. It was loosely adapted from Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff's book Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry. The film is a fictional account of the creation of the BlackBerry line of mobile phone by co-founders Douglas Fregin and Mike Lazaridis, and investor Jim Balsillie. Lazaridis is portrayed by Jay Baruchel, Balsillie is portrayed by Glenn Howerton, and Fregin is portrayed by Johnson. It also stars Rich Sommer, Michael Ironside, Martin Donovan, Michelle Giroux, SungWon Cho, Mark Critch, Saul Rubinek, and Cary Elwes in supporting roles.

BlackBerry premiered in competition at the 73rd Berlin International Film Festival on February 17, 2023. The film was released in Canada on May 12, 2023, to positive reviews. In late 2023, Blackberry was re-released as a three-part miniseries with additional footage.

The film is the most nominated film in the history of the Canadian Screen Awards, with 17 nominations. It won 14 awards, including Best Motion Picture.

Plot
In Waterloo, 1996, Research in Motion (RIM) CEO Mike Lazaridis and his best friend and co-founder Douglas Fregin prepare to pitch their "PocketLink" cellular device to businessman Jim Balsillie. Lazaridis is bothered by the buzzing of Balsillie's China-manufactured intercom and fixes it before Balsillie arrives to the meeting. Their pitch is unsuccessful, but after Balsillie is fired from his job due to his aggressive ambition, he offers to invest $20,000 for 50% of the company and a position as CEO. Lazaridis, prompted by Fregin, initially declines Balsillie's offer, but after confirming Balsillie's suspicion that their $16 million deal with USRobotics was in bad faith, they bring Balsillie in as a co-CEO with Lazaridis and sell him a 33% stake in RIM for $125,000. After joining RIM, Balsillie discovers that the company is in a dire financial position and he mortgages his house to add a cash infusion to make payroll.

Balsillie arranges a pitch for the PocketLink with Bell Atlantic and forces Fregin and Lazaridis to build a crude prototype overnight, which he and Lazaridis take to New York. Lazaridis forgets the prototype in their taxi, leaving Balsillie to attempt the pitch alone. Lazaridis recovers the prototype at the last second and finishes the pitch, and they rebrand the PocketLink as the "BlackBerry", which becomes massively successful.

In 2003, Palm CEO Carl Yankowski plans a hostile takeover of the immensely successful RIM, forcing Balsillie to try to raise RIM's stockprice by selling more phones than Bell Atlantic's (now Verizon Communications) network can support. This crashes the network, as Lazaridis had warned, so Balsillie poaches engineers from around the world to fix the problem, as well as hiring a man named Charles Purdy as RIM's COO to keep the engineers in line, though this upsets Fregin, who values the casual and fun work environment he and Lazaridis had created. The new engineers fix the network issue under Purdy's strict management, and RIM avoids Yankowski's buyout.

In 2007, RIM's upcoming pitch of the BlackBerry Bold to Verizon is thrown into chaos when Steve Jobs announces the iPhone. Balsillie, a hockey fan with a long-term ambition of owning an NHL team, is occupied with trying to purchase the Pittsburgh Penguins, forcing Lazaridis to pitch the Bold with Fregin instead. When it goes poorly, he panics and impulsively promises them the "Storm", a BlackBerry with a touchscreen. As he finally agrees with Purdy's suggestion to outsource the labor of the Storm to China, he insults Fregin during an argument. Fregin later quits RIM as a result.

Balsillie becomes nervous when he sees the iPhone's projected sales and tries to arrange a meeting with AT&T's CEO, only to learn that the Penguins sale is being finalized that day. He prioritizes the Penguins but is rejected when the NHL owners reveal knowledge of his plan to move the team to Hamilton, which they learned of through his boasting to Yankowski. The US SEC raid RIM after learning that Balsillie hired the engineers in 2003 with illegally backdated stock options, threatening Lazaridis with legal action. Balsillie misses his chance to meet with AT&T's CEO, who snubs Balsillie by hinting that AT&T's partnership with Apple is predicated on the fact that data usage has superseded phone minutes as a priority. Balsillie returns to RIM to find that Lazaridis has exposed him to the SEC, leaving Lazaridis as the sole CEO of RIM.

One year later, the Storms arrive from China, but Lazaridis finds them to be laden with bugs and can hear buzzing when he holds one to his ear. As he begins manually fixing the buzzing phones one by one, the closing titles reveal that the Storms were almost universally inoperable and Verizon sued RIM to cover the financial loss. Lazaridis resigned as CEO in 2012, Balsillie avoided jail, and Fregin became one of the richest men in the world by selling his stock in 2007. At the height of its success, the BlackBerry phone made up 45% of the cell phone market and is now 0% in the present day, with BlackBerry phones no longer being produced.

Production
Principal photography took place from June to August 2022 in the Ontario cities of Hamilton, London, Burlington and Waterloo. Additional scenes were filmed in Silicon Valley, California. In June, the London International Airport was used to film multiple airport scenes, employing local residents as background actors.

Release
BlackBerry premiered in competition at the 73rd Berlin International Film Festival on February 17, 2023. IFC Films acquired the rights to distribute the film in the United States, with Paramount Global Content Distribution acquiring multiple international territories for distribution. The film was released in Canada on May 12, 2023, by Elevation Pictures.

In January 2024 Elevation Pictures struck a 35 mm print of the film to screen and it closed TIFF's Canada's Top Ten at the TIFF Lightbox. Johnson and guest Vass Bednar led a Q&A after the screening. The print would later be screened in the United States.

Television miniseries
An extended, serialized version of the film began airing as a three-part miniseries on CBC Television and the CBC Gem streaming service on November 9, 2023. It includes 16 minutes of additional footage that was not part of the theatrical release. In the United States the series aired on AMC and streamed on AMC+, on November 13, 2023.

Critical response


Barry Hertz of The Globe and Mail named the film as third of the 23 best Canadian comedy films ever made. The film was named to the Toronto International Film Festival's annual Canada's Top Ten list for 2023. It was also named as the fourth-best film of 2023 by film critic Cory Woodroof for USA Today's For the Win.

Former company executives have taken issues and raised concerns at the magnitude of fiction presented in the movie, with some considering it to be offensive to RIM's legacy. Jim Balsillie has said his on-screen depiction as an aggressive and morally-dubious businessman is almost entirely fictional and inaccurate to how he was while at RIM. Despite this, Jim received the film positively and praised Glenn Howerton's performance of himself as being "brilliant".