PERFORMANCE IMPROVEMENT PLAN | Coleman Spilde, Entertainment Critic / The Daily Beast
More often than not, corporate biopics are a waste of both talent and time.
You want business stories?
Read the damn Wikipedia page.
The Corporate Biopic Genre Needs Major Restructuring
PERFORMANCE IMPROVEMENT PLAN
Since the success of “The Social Network,” Hollywood has treated audiences to a deluge of corporate biopics. It’s time for their performance review—which isn’t looking great.
Photo Illustration by Luis G. Rendon/The Daily Beast/Netflix/Sony/Hulu
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If Hollywood had its way, you’d watch The Beanie Bubblewith your Air Jordan-clad feet up on the table, munching on Hot Cheetos, while playing Tetris on your BlackBerry. But you’d also watch the film—the latest in an ever-growing collection of corporate biopics—while deriding our current cultural moment. You’d sit in a haze of nostalgia, reminiscing about your favorite Beanie Babies, thinking about how things were so much simpler in the ’90s. After all, back then, there were no phony tech companies like Theranos and WeWork ruining good people’s lives. Then, you’d grab your Steve Jobs-invented iPhone to post that keen observation on your preferred social network, getting Cheeto dust all over the screen.
Elizabeth Banks in The Beanie Bubble.
Apple TV+
Since the success of David Fincher’s 2010 film The Social Network—which arguably ushered in this trendy subgenre for our modern era—Hollywood has treated audiences to a deluge of corporate biopics. If you’re somehow unfamiliar, these are films or limited series recounting the stories of big brands and/or big names in the business world: Steve Jobs, Elizabeth Holmes, Nike, McDonald's, and an endlessly growing list of others. Their trailers typically have some version of the words “inspired by true events” pop up over increasingly dramatic music, and promise a real glimpse at the person or people behind the brands.
The timing may very well be coincidental, but 2023 has already seen the release of five corporate biopics, and the year is barely half over: Tetris, BlackBerry, Flamin’ Hot, Air, and now The Beanie Bubble. Each one of these films may vary in quality, but The Beanie Bubble is unquestionably the most conventional of them all, stretched so thin that the pellets of its titular plush product should be spilling out. With such a dense concentration of these types of films dropping, it ironically seems that the corporate biopic subgenre’s own bubble is about to burst. These films have become the very thing they once warned against: capitalistic cash grabs that favor a return on investment rather than making a serviceable product for a captive audience.
If we’re going to examine the trend’s flailing longevity, we must first properly revere its shining crown jewel. The Social Network is indeed thatgood. If you think back to the 2011 Oscars ceremony, and have settled on “Well, The King’s Speech deserved its Best Picture win,” you’re either British, lying to yourself, or some combination of both. Fincher’s film was not just a marvel—it was also a blueprint for how to turn a biographical movie about a public figure into a portrait of ambition gone wrong in the contemporary age. Each piece of The Social Network—its performances, score, cinematography, script, and beyond—serves every other aspect of the film, letting the movie run in a cyclical hum that never once wavers.
In the years since, many have tried to replicate The Social Network’s success, but few have come close. I’ve often suspected that this is because most screenwriters and directors—themselves usually entrenched in an industry where billions of dollars feed corruption, like a snake eating its own tail—find the subjects of their corporate biopics to be inherently interesting. . ."
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