For a time, BlackBerry phones were the phones to have, with corporate executives and heads of state using them to answer emails and perform tasks that other cell phones couldn’t.
Those days have long passed. Now, film studios want to relive the company’s rise and fall in a new film, from the time it was still known as Research in Motion until it lost its battle against Google and Apple.
According to Variety, Matt Johnson, the director of Operation Avalanche, has recently completed production on the upcoming film simply titled BlackBerry.
According to Variety, it stars Jay Baruchel (This Is the End) and Glenn Howerton (It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia). Though it hasn’t been confirmed, they’re most likely portraying the company’s co-founders and CEOs, Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie.
The screenplay is based on The Globe and Mail reporters Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff’s book Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind BlackBerry’s Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall.
Because the book was published in 2015, the film is unlikely to include all of the failed attempts to revive the brand that occurred in the years since.
TCL produced new BlackBerry phones in 2019 until the company decided not to renew its contract and stopped selling the devices a year later.
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OnwardMobility, a security startup, then announced plans to release a 5G BlackBerry smartphone with a physical keyboard in North America and Europe in 2021. Those plans, however, never came to fruition.
OnwardMobility reportedly lost its license to use the BlackBerry name and was forced to close its doors in February of this year.
