Sony Exec Called Aaron Sorkin’s Steve Jobs Script “Brilliant, Masterful”; Tom Cruise Originally Eyed As Apple Co-Founder

It’s been a rough few weeks for Sony and Sony Pictures. At the mercy of a massive security attack, the film company saw several of its yet-to-be-released assets leak to the public, including review copies for films such as Fury and Annie. But that’s not all the information that slipped through the cracks of the company’s flailing firewall, after Defamer picked up on the email exchange between Scott Rudin and Sony exec Amy Pascal over Danny Boyle’s as-yet-untitled Steve Jobs biopic.

You can catch the somewhat heated dialogue in full over at Defamer, but one of the core takeaways is how fellow Sony executive Michael Pavlic reacted to Sorkin’s screenplay, describing the approach as “brilliant and masterful.”

It’s brilliant. It’s perfect. I will say it was a constant battle for me between movie lover and my actual job of marketer… but it’s truly masterful.

Let’s take the obvious off the table here – there are marketing liabilities to this script. It’s long, it’s claustrophobic, it’s talky, it could be a play, it risks being all one medium close up, it’s periody. It’s a mediation on Jobs himself. It’s one of his early computers – closed end to end. It’s insistent upon itself, it’s relentless.

It’s interesting to have a peak behind the scenes at Sony to see the goings-on before the studio eventually decided to drop Sorkin and Boyle’s rendition of the late, great Apple visionary. Speaking of which, during the nascent stages of development, it’s understood that none other than Tom Cruise was attached to star as Jobs.

“Tom’s going to surprise some people and they’ll want to reward that. I don’t think we’d have to recast Woz,” before touching upon the possibility of Fassbender taking up the mantle. “I don’t know who Michael Fassbender is and the rest of the world isn’t going to care. This is insane.” But he quickly changed his tune. “Fuck it. He’s a great actor whose time has come….if the movie’s good, he’ll be on the cover of everything and get nominated for everything.”

Given the debacle surrounding it and its recent studio switch, it’s hardly surprising that Boyle’s Steve Jobs biopic is still without a release date and title, but given that Natalie Portman and Michael Fassbender are reportedly involved, it shouldn’t be too long before the wheels begin to turn once more on Sorkin’s long-gestating picture.