Steve Jobs biopic fails at box office opening weekend

Danny Boyle's Steve Jobs biopic bombed at the box office in its opening weekend, bringing in a mere $7.3m (£4.8m), less than a third of of the film's production costs. The movie based on the life of Apple founder recorded the best per-theatre average of 2015 earlier this month, took in more than $130,000 (£85,000) when it opened at select theatres in the US as part of a slow rollout to generate pre-release buzz.

The film, starring Michael Fassbender, took less than the 2013 Jobs movie which starred Ashton Kutcher as the Apple innovator. The 2015 film, which entered the US box office in seventh position, made less than half of the earnings of Ridley Scott's space thriller The Martian, which took the top spot in the box office and brought in $15.9m (£10.4m).

The film, which cost $30m (£19.6m) to produce was expected to make as much as $19m (£12.4m) in its opening week, according to US culture magazine Variety. They predicted that the film would need to make at least $120m (£78.1m) in order to cover production and marketing costs.

The film focuses on several key points in Jobs's career, including the 1984 launch of Apple's first Macintosh computer. Jobs's widow Laurene Powell Jobs, lobbied the film's production companies because of its unfair depiction of the technology innovator, controversially representing Jobs's character and family life, the Wall Street Journal reports.

The biopic initally received a warm reception from critics, receiving an 85% rating from 168 reviews on film website Rotten Tomatoes. Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, who acted as a consultant on the film, said he was "shocked and amazed at how good it was" in an interview with the BBC.

Meanwhile, Apple's current CEO Tim Cook, panned films about Jobs as "opportunistic" admitting that he had not watched any of them. Another film by Alex Gibney, based on the life of the Apple founder, Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine, opened in the US during September and has already brought in almost $500,000 according to film website IMDb.