The long-awaited Jobs movie opened this weekend, with Box Office Mojo reporting that it took seventh place in the weekend openings, grossing $6.7M against top-grossing movie The Butler at $25M. Distributor Open Road Films had expected Jobs to gross $8-9M.
The movie had been heavily promoted, and with so many pre-release clips out there you almost felt like you’d seen the movie before it hit theaters. Reviews were best described as mixed, with critics giving it a Rotten Tomatoes rating of just 25 percent.
Steve Wozniak, who had declined to act as a consultant to the movie after reading the script and saying he was “abhorred” by it, said that “there were a lot of things wrong,” with Jobs portrayed in too glowing a light. Speaking in an interview on Bloomberg TV, Wozniak blamed Ashton Kutcher’s reverence for Jobs, saying that Kutcher appeared to have had something of a producer as well as acting role:
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[Jobs] failed with the Apple III, he failed with the Lisa, he failed with the Macintosh. People don’t know from the movie how deeply the Macintosh failed, how deeply our stock slide down, how we had to regroup quickly and build a Macintosh market over three years.
Wozniak clearly feels he wasn’t given sufficient credit for his role, and that the importance of the Apple II – the product bringing in the revenues to support the marketing of the Macintosh – was underplayed, but also spoke up for other key players in the company at the same time.
Two of Apple’s early employees, Daniel Kottke and Bill Fernandez, had commented on a series of inaccuracies in the movie.
Wozniak is consulting on the Aaron Sorkin movie, which doesn’t yet have a release date.
