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Will Steve Jobs’ story make a good feature film?

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Walter Isaacson’s upcoming ‘Steve Jobs’ biography has been surging up the Amazon sales charts, as consumers order advance copies of the book about the late Apple co-founder. Now Hollywood has taken notice: Sony Pictures is poised to land rights to the tome, according to Deadline.

Isaacson’s book, which comes out later this month, looks to be the definitive account of Jobs’ life and career. Will it make a good movie?

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Jobs’ story has a triumph-of-the-underdog quality -- his Apple fought behemoths like IBM and Microsoft for years before (usually) coming out on top -- and he of course lost and then regained control of the company. And a film about one of the great visionaries of the modern era would seem like an easy sell in a time when a movie about a technological entrepreneur such as ‘The Social Network’ has been a big hit.

Then again, Jobs’ story is already well-known, and will be even more so by the time a film arrives. And ‘The Social Network’ achieved popularity by getting at the underlying tragedy of the Mark Zuckerburg figure, something that may be trickier with a worldbeater like Jobs. Still, his story would attract a top-tier filmmaking team. Sony’s move makes the Jobs tale one of the hottest film projects in Hollywood that’s nowhere near becoming a movie.

-- Steven Zeitchik

twitter.com/ZeitchikLAT

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