BlackBerry Movie Confirmed Starring ‘It’s Always Sunny’

If you had told someone in 2011 that BlackBerry would no longer be making smartphones in a decade, they would have a hard time believing you.

Fast forward to 2022 and the world is no longer full of Bolds, Pearls and Classics with their full QWERTY keyboards, and BlackBerry is now a corporate security company.

The huge rise and devastating fall of one of the world’s most successful telephone companies should be dramatized in a new film, according to Variety, which reported the film recently wrapped production and will star “It’s Always Sunny” in the Philadelphia films “Glenn Howerton” and ” A little pregnant.” Jay Baruchel.

The movie is reportedly called BlackBerry. The film chronicles the founding of Research In Motion (RIM), a Canadian company that made BlackBerry phones (and changed its name to BlackBerry in 2013), from the early 2000s until sales plummeted due to failure. respond to the advent of the iPhone and Android.

Although not confirmed, it is likely that Howerton and Baruchel will play RIM co-founders Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie. BlackBerry will co-star with Cary Elwes, Saul Rubinek and Riker Sommer and will be directed by Matt Johnson.

Although the first iPhone with a full touch screen was released in 2007, BlackBerry’s most profitable year in terms of revenue came in 2011, when the company earned $19.9 billion. It was its peak even three years after the ill-fated BlackBerry Storm, which in 2008 was the company’s attempt to mimic the iPhone, but the Storm had a resistive rather than capacitive touchscreen and it was a terrible device that bombed.

RIM held on thanks to the popularity of its QWERTY phones with consumers and celebrities like Kim Kardashian before releasing its latest BlackBerry Priv Android phone in 2015.

In 2016, it licensed the BlackBerry name to TCL, which released the BlackBerry KeyOne, Key2, Motion, and Key2 LE, three of which were Android phones with QWERTY keyboards, but even that relationship ended. The 5G BlackBerry in question, built by startup Onward Mobility, has been shelved after the company went bankrupt.

We don’t suspect the BlackBerry movie will go that far as it is based on the 2015 book Losing Signal: The Untold Story of BlackBerry’s Incredible Rise and Spectacular Fall, written by Jackie McNish and Sean Silkoff, Canadian reporters. So you can expect juicy details about how the company hits unforeseen heights before seeing its empire crumble around it.

No release date has been confirmed, but the film is not expected to release until 2023 at the earliest.