Blackberry Movie lands on Netflix, and a once-forgotten tech rise feels personal again

At lunchtime in the U. S. on Tuesday (ET), the scroll of Netflix tiles keeps moving—until blackberry movie appears, newly available, asking for two hours of attention and, maybe, a little emotional honesty. It’s a biographical comedy-drama about BlackBerry’s rise and fall, but it plays like something more intimate: a reminder of how quickly a “sure thing” can become yesterday’s story.

What is Blackberry Movie, and why are people noticing it now?

Blackberry Movie is a dramatized account of the history of BlackBerry—its meteoric climb to the top of the mobile phone market and its subsequent fall after the debut of the iPhone. The film, titled BlackBerry, was originally released in 2023 and is now available to watch on Netflix beginning today.

It stars Glenn Howerton—known to many viewers from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia—alongside a large ensemble that includes Jay Baruchel, Matt Johnson, Rich Sommer, Michael Ironside, Martin Donovan, Michelle Giroux, SungWon Cho, Mark Critch, Saul Rubinek, and Cary Elwes. The film is directed by Matt Johnson and written by Johnson and Matthew Miller, based on the book Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry by Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff.

Critical reception has been strong: the film carries a 97% Rotten Tomatoes score and a 94% audience score. It also became the most-nominated film in the history of the Canadian Screen Awards, winning 14 awards including Best Motion Picture.

Why does Glenn Howerton’s performance matter in this release?

For many viewers arriving fresh on Netflix, the surprise isn’t that the film works—it’s that it works on multiple frequencies at once. Howerton plays Jim Balsillie, the CEO figure who “relentlessly finds a way to make BlackBerry an international success. ” The role has drawn attention for its intensity and velocity, channeling energy familiar to fans of his long-running comedy series while staying grounded in the pressure-cooker world of business.

Howerton’s performance also became a focal point of the film’s awards conversation. He received nominations from the Independent Spirit Awards and the Gotham Awards for his supporting performance. Yet despite the film’s acclaim and visibility within its year of eligibility, BlackBerry received zero Academy Award nominations. That gap—between a widely praised work and the absence of Oscars recognition—has become part of the story viewers are now inheriting as they press play.

The film’s own logline sets the tempo: “The ‘true story’ of the meteoric rise & catastrophic demise of the world’s first smartphone, BlackBerry is a whirlwind ride through a ruthlessly competitive Silicon Valley at breakneck speeds. ” It’s the kind of framing that invites an audience to watch not only for plot, but for the human mechanics of momentum: how confidence becomes certainty, how certainty becomes risk, and how risk becomes collapse.

How does the story connect to bigger conversations about tech, memory, and recognition?

On its surface, BlackBerry sits comfortably in a lineage of modern business biopics—films that translate boardroom strategy and product obsession into character-driven tension. One comparison offered in the public discussion places it in a similar vein to The Social Network and Steve Jobs, while also noting that BlackBerry earned a higher Rotten Tomatoes score than The Social Network (96%). Yet the Netflix arrival sharpens a different point: cultural memory can be selective, and the story of BlackBerry’s origins was “far less known, or forgotten, ” when the movie came out in 2023.

That’s where the film’s tone matters. It’s described as endearing and intense, a comedy and a period piece set in the early 1990s, following “a group of misfits” pushing into the fiercely competitive world of business with a revolutionary product. The humor is not decoration; it’s part of how the film depicts an era when the tech craze was still in its infancy, when invention and ego could share the same room without anyone seeing the fire hazard.

Critic Marya E. Gates points to craft rather than mythmaking: “The comedy comes instead from Johnson’s deliberate direction. It’s found in an ironic zoom here, a hilarious cut there. This alchemy finds the most magic in how it supports Glenn Howerton’s towering performance. ” The comment captures what viewers often struggle to name: that the most effective “true story” movies aren’t simply informative—they are engineered to make speed, pressure, and ambition feel bodily.

For Netflix subscribers, the timing also reframes the conversation about what rises to the top of a viewing queue. A film can be critically praised, decorated with major national awards, and still feel like a discovery once it arrives in a place where millions browse nightly, hunting for something they “still can’t believe no-one talks about. ”

What should Netflix viewers expect when they press play?

Viewers should expect a dramatized story that moves quickly and switches emotional gears. Audience reactions have highlighted that the film “starts out as a very funny comedy and ends as a very sad tragedy, ” bridging two tones that rarely coexist cleanly. That tonal shift mirrors the narrative arc: the exhilaration of building something new, followed by the unnerving realization that leadership, competition, and timing can turn triumph into an exit.

They should also expect a film that encourages curiosity about the people on screen—an impulse some viewers describe as immediate, the kind of watch that makes you want to look up everyone involved. The movie’s own structure invites that reaction by focusing on Mike Lazaridis (played by Jay Baruchel) and Doug Fregin (played by director Matt Johnson) as they invent the BlackBerry and struggle to find an investor, before meeting Balsillie and pushing toward global success.

Yet the film’s appeal isn’t simply nostalgia or tech trivia. It’s the human texture of work under pressure: a “nerds-versus-suits” friction; the tension of belief meeting skepticism; the comedy of mistakes made in public; and the private dread that success can be temporary. The film is also candid about the limitations of dramatization—entertaining and often humorous, even if not “entirely accurate to the real-life story. ”

By late evening (ET), many first-time viewers will have finished it and returned to the Netflix home screen. But the story tends to linger, partly because it is not only about a company. It’s about the sensation of living inside a breakthrough—and then watching the world move on. With blackberry movie now one click away, that sensation is no longer tucked into film-festival conversations or awards tallies; it’s in the living room, waiting to be remembered.