BlackBerry film: Canadian film documents rise and fall of Research in Motion

The story of Canada’s tarnished pocket gem the BlackBerry is headed for the flicks.

Producers say filming has wrapped on a feature-length manufacturing that recounts the rise and fall of the machine – as soon as affectionately often called the CrackBerry amongst its most obsessed customers.

BlackBerry centres across the masterminds at Research In Motion Ltd. (RIM), the Waterloo, Ont.-based expertise firm accountable for creating what was as soon as the world’s hottest smartphone model, years earlier than Apple’s iPhone got here to market.

A consultant for Canadian distributor Elevation Pictures says the film will co-star Glenn Howerton, solid member of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, as co-CEO Jim Balsillie, whereas Ottawa-born Jay Baruchel, identified for the comedy Knocked Up, will play his enterprise associate and firm co-founder Mike Lazaridis.

BlackBerry is customized from the non-fiction e book Losing the Signal: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of BlackBerry, written by Globe and Mail reporters Sean Silcoff and Jacquie McNish.

The film was shot largely in the Hamilton space by director Matt Johnson, whose earlier work consists of The Dirties, Operation Avalanche and TV docu-comedy Nirvanna the Band the Show.

Other solid members embody Cary Elwes of Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning, Saul Rubinek from True Romance and Michael Ironside from Total Recall.

RIM was based in 1984 by Lazaridis and Doug Fregin, two enterprise companions who had beforehand labored collectively on a failed LED signal enterprise. After a decade of dabbling in varied different expertise initiatives, they turned their consideration to the two-way communications methods that may turn out to be the muse for the BlackBerry machine.

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Balsillie, a Harvard graduate, remortgaged his home at 33 years outdated to speculate $250,000 into the thought. By the mid-Nineteen Nineties the corporate had debuted its first hand-held pager, on the highway to creating the machine that solidified its fame.

For years, BlackBerry was the dominant smartphone, seen in the arms of everybody from celebrities to common residents. The model loved that standing till the iPhone debuted in 2007. A 12 months later, RIM launched a mix keypad and touchscreen machine in what turned out to be the beginning of its downfall in the patron market.

Behind the scenes, there have been a number of community outages and unrest among the many firm’s board of administrators over the place the BlackBerry model ought to go subsequent.

At its peak, RIM was essentially the most invaluable firm in Canada, with a market worth that handed even the nation’s greatest banks.

BlackBerry is financed by XYZ Films which intends to buy the film to international distributors on the Toronto International Film Festival in September.