Hollywood's increasing love for big-brand biopics, from Air to Tetris

Does a spate of commercially themed movies mean that cinema is running out of heroes?

Ben Affleck as Nike chief executive Phil Knight in Air. Affleck also directed the product-themed film. Photo: Amazon Content Services

So it’s come to this. In Hollywood’s ever more desperate search for ideas, we’re now at the stage where brands are considered viable intellectual property. Once upon a time product placement was about slipping in a cheeky nod to a luxury watch or a drink — usually with the manufacturer paying top dollar to see its creation on camera for a few fleeting seconds. Now, entire narratives are being built around consumer desirables.

This Thursday marks the arrival of Air, Ben Affleck's new film about how Nike convinced basketball star Michael Jordan to endorse its trainers. Driven by chief executive Phil Knight (Affleck) and his basketball guru Sonny Vaccaro (Matt Damon), their determination led to the Air Jordan — a brand that sold $162 million worth of shoes in its first year alone. In 2022, the Jordan brand generated $5 billion in annual revenue. Unless you’re James Cameron, directing an Avatar sequel, it’s the sort of numbers Hollywood studios can only dream of.

Air is certainly entertaining and makes a valid point about how Jordan’s deal, gaining a revenue share on all shoes sold with his name on, paved the way for other athletes to do the same. Affleck and his fellow cast members — particularly Viola Davis, as Jordan’s mother, Delores — do a fine job of humanising the tale.

But it’s still hard to shake the feeling that we’re being sold a story about a shoe. Which, apart from having slightly more red in its colouring, doesn’t seem that different to any other trainer on the market.

If sports shoes aren’t your thing, you could instead try Jon S Baird's Tetris.

Like Air, it deals with the origins of a must-have pop culture artefact — the highly addictive game that requires a player to jigsaw together coloured blocks as they fall down the screen. In truth, it’s a fascinating story, as American entrepreneur Henk Rogers (Rocketman star Taron Egerton) goes to Soviet-era Russia to win the rights to releasing the game worldwide.

Like Air, Baird’s film is set in the 1980s and focuses on a product — in this case Nintendo’s hand-held Game Boy console, which launched Tetris across the world. Both the Air Jordan and the Game Boy are revealed from underneath a cloth, almost like they’re part of a magician’s act. Tetris is similarly obsessed by numbers, too. The end credits — cut to Pet Shop Boys’ Opportunities (Let’s Make Lots of Money), naturally — tell us that after selling half a billion copies, Tetris “continues to be one of the most popular games of all time”.

The film has also been released via Apple TV+, itself a subsidiary of Apple Inc, an American multinational that knows a thing or two about creating desirable products. But we’ve already seen that film — Danny Boyle’s 2015 movie Steve Jobs, a biography of Apple’s titular co-founder, which partly covers the launch of the revolutionary iMac.

The rebel "genius" figure is a common denominator in a lot of these films; 2018’s Driven similarly celebrated John DeLorean, the visionary car designer who launched the silver-winged DeLorean, made famous in the Back to the Future films.

There is a legitimate reason for telling some of these stories. David Fincher’s The Social Network dealt with Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg (played by Jesse Eisenberg) and the launch of Facebook — the social networking site that has arguably changed the way we communicate. Likewise, The Founder follows Michael Keaton as Ray Kroc, the salesman who turned McDonald’s into a global fast food chain, changing the way millions eat.

From trainers to Big Macs, Hollywood seems increasingly in love with capitalist success stories.

Much more interesting, though, is Matt Johnson’s coming film BlackBerry. For once, it’s about commercial failure, tracing the rise and fall of Research In Motion, the Canadian company behind the BlackBerry, which trailblazed the way we could receive emails on our phones. After the incredible highs of the early 2000s, selling more than 50 million devices a year, it plunged to a staggering 0 per cent of the smartphone market.

The film, which stars Jay Baruchel as Research In Motion's Mike Lazaridis, is a perfect study in Icarus-like hubris. What it makes you wonder is this: has Hollywood simply run out of movie heroes? Are the studios simply reduced to celebrating gadgets, fast food chains, sporting goods and techno trends?

So what’s next? A biopic about the creation of Kentucky Fried Chicken or the Dyson vacuum cleaner? The creators might argue these stories cut deeper, dealing with innovation and rule-breaking. But at their core, the message is clear: buy, buy, buy.

Tetris is now on Apple TV+; Air is in UAE cinemas from April 6