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Whether they’re successful, however, is another matter entirely. These product-focused films and corporate biopics come at the same problem of wooing audiences in different ways. The best films, like Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie,” manage to either interrogate their brand—tearing it down or building it up as necessary—or somehow manage the trick of replacing the product in the audience’s mind with some core emotion they can tap into instead.
There are a few key strategies in films like this. As we’ve seen in some of the corporate biopics released in 2023, the first is to honor the product above all else. Ben Affleck’s “Air,” the story of Nike’s wooing of Michael Jordan as he prepares to enter the NBA, spends absolutely zero time trying to convince you it’s about anything other than the Air Jordan. Instead, it banks on the audience’s feelings of affection for Jordan and, by extension, the Nike brand. It treats the basketball player as a mythical figure whose influence will stretch down through the generations—because it must, in order to justify the film’s existence. If we see Michael Jordan as anything less than a god walking among mere men, “Air” doesn’t work.
“BlackBerry,” directed by Matthew Johnson, makes tragic heroes of the cell phone’s founders, taking fairly straightforward business dealings and creating high Shakespearean drama and an epic fall from grace. Whatever the eventual fate of the BlackBerry, there was a time in the early 2000s when it was the phone to have. The film honors its inventor’s sense of innovation, exploring the monumental impact that its technology and product design had on the future of smartphones, a now ubiquitous component of everyday life. The BlackBerry thus becomes not one of the 21st century’s greatest telecommunications failures but the creative output of a modern-day Icarus.
Eva Longoria’s “Flamin’ Hot,” by contrast, details the development of something as seemingly inconsequential as the Flamin’ Hot Cheeto, a spicy snack first released in the early ‘90s that forever changed the game of munchies. But you can’t just make a movie about spicy seasoning—that would be ridiculous. “Flamin’ Hot” frames the introduction of a product at Frito-Lay as the classic immigrant story, in which a humble janitor taps into a market that the ivory tower executives had long been overlooking.
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