The Corporate Biopic Genre Needs Major Restructuring

If Hollywood had its way, you’d watch The Beanie Bubble with 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.

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 that good. 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. Rather than studying Fincher’s work, which so carefully imbued a wealth of human nuance into a young, not-yet-shark-eyed Mark Zuckerberg, most corporate biopics settle for something more straightforward. These linear, bland adaptations of a very recent past could use their story’s inherent modernity to subvert a viewer’s expectations. Instead, they often refuse to use our acquaintance with the subject to play with the cinematic form. They can do that with little film industry pushback, since the average viewer is already aware of the central luminaries’ product. Why aim for refined sophistication when a vapid piece of digital ooze can attract viewers from the familiarity factor alone?

Well, because audiences are growing wise to the tricks of the trade. It’s just like how a limited series can no longer be considered “prestige television” just because it stars a handful of big-name actors. Corporate biopics are not automatically gripping because they traffic in recognizable brands with backstories of underestimated ambition or disrepute. Instead, they manufacture scandal to amp up their storylines or use nostalgia to prop up its narratives, when the actual true stories aren’t juicy enough to fill the runtime of a film or series.

Take The Founder, an ironically bland biopic about McDonald’s co-founder Ray Kroc. Released in 2016, the film serves up little more than a streamlined history of the most recognizable symbol of American capitalism in place of any groundbreaking storytelling ideas. Like everything on the McDonald’s menu, The Founder lacquers a decent product with so much salt and industry-grade chemicals—men who deliver all their dialogue with their hands on their hips, women reduced to thin sketches of wives and mothers, lines like, “Contracts are made to be broken”—that you might be tricked into thinking it’s decent until you develop a taste for something better.

The same goes for this past March’s Tetris, which similarly preys on decades-worth of audiences’ wistful nostalgia attached to its titular video game to get them to press play. Tetris, at least, offers some arresting visuals and a stellar soundtrack to prop it up. But if you try to look past this surface, it’s game over; the ever-building blocks of fast-paced action ultimately amount to a story that would be far more interesting if focused on the game's creator, and not its mustachioed broker for American markets.

Sometimes, these films are, at worst, so forced that they have to take a disputed story at face value, just to make the resulting biopic more intriguing. That was the case for June’s Flamin’ Hot, which had its origin story debunked, but made into a movie anyway. No matter that its source was spurious—it could still be transmuted into an inspiring tale about working-class ambition through the lens of the ever-trendy corporate biopic.

Both Tetris and The Founder were saddled with early comparisons to The Social Network’s gold standard long before either film was released. (Poor Taron Egerton needed something to talk about when asked about Tetris mid-pandemic.) But while neither movie really adhered to The Social Network’s mold, Danny Boyle’s 2015 film Steve Jobs was essentially a replica of Fincher’s work, right down to its Aaron Sorkin-penned screenplay. But it was proof that Sorkin’s dialogue-heavy script wasn’t The Social Network’s key to success, but the film’s ability to humanize Zuckerberg. (It also didn’t help that Ashton Kutcher of all people beat Boyle, Sorkin, and star Michael Fassbender to the punch with his 2013 biopic Jobs, only adding to the fatigue.) Steve Jobs instead spent its runtime only peering at the men behind an empire, breathlessly talking around the true pressures—and crushing responsibilities—of Jobs’ genius.

Humanity is the thing that differentiates a legitimately great corporate biopic from a highly glamorized cursory Google search. You can have a stylish production (Tetris), a script packed to the gills with heady dialogue (Steve Jobs), and fantastic actors at the helm (2022’s WeCrashed, a limited series about WeWork). But they each can and almost certainly will fall short if the story at the center of it all isn’t substantially empathetic. The relatability of these virtuoso inventors hinges on filmmakers and showrunners being able to dig deep and convey their humanness on a molecular level. We need to understand what makes them tick, what drives them, and how these seemingly once-in-a-lifetime ideas—or all the smoke and mirrors that built them—are actually the product of perseverance (or, perhaps, delusion) that we all have inside of us.

That’s precisely why Hulu’s 2022 limited series The Dropout worked so well: Amanda Seyfried’s Emmy-winning performance as Theranos con artist Elizabeth Holmes was rooted in empathy. Seyfried dove into her character’s warped mindset to bring a legitimate, almost shocking relatability to Holmes, while never letting a person who posed a legitimate threat to modern health care off the hook. The same can’t be said for WeCrashed or Showtime’s limited series about Uber, Super Pumped, both of which use showy lead performances to try to distract viewers from both series’ lack of substance. (In WeCrashed, Jared Leto and Anne Hathaway star as Adam and Rebekah Neumann, the minds behind the co-working space; Super Pumped stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Travis Kalanick, co-founder of Uber.) It’s as if industry players saw the theatrical market getting too crowded with corporate biopics and decided to rectify that by pivoting to TV series order that absolutely no one asked for.

It’s not all doom and gloom for the subgenre, though. There are still a few projects that successfully achieve the tenet of empathy that the best corporate biopics are built on, while also playing with the form as The Social Network did so successfully. BlackBerry was a welcome surprise in the spring; the film is a smart, deftly written work that balances wry comedy with an absorbing—and remarkably unfamiliar—story. Then there’s Air, a mainstream crowd-pleaser that uses its recognizable brand names and actors to lure audiences, and provides enough mushy, cinematic schmaltz to benefit its narrative. It does all this without Michael Jordan ever appearing on screen, adding to its inventiveness. It’s just a shame that everything that exists somewhere between these two poles is either forgettable or offensively presumptuous of its own quality.

Even well-intentioned stories about capitalistic endeavors—or more cautionary tales of corporate greed and multibillion-dollar companies—shouldn’t be retold lightly. They shouldn’t be shat out with all of the care of someone throwing a piece of garbage out of a moving car, plopped onto this dying planet for no reason other than “Why the hell not?” Maybe it’s bleak to say, but not every story is worth telling, let alone with an expensive budget and recognizable talent attached. It’s that mindset that gives us highly dramatized films about Beanie Babies, a toy with about as much corruption behind the scenes of its success as your everyday TJ Maxx franchise probably does. (And in the case of those toys, there’s already a much more engaging and successful documentary about said story.) More often than not, corporate biopics are a waste of both talent and time. You want business stories? Read the damn Wikipedia page.