The tech industry has always been stranger than fiction, which is probably why filmmakers keep returning to it. College dropouts who changed the world, founders who betrayed their co-founders, companies that collapsed despite being right about everything, the films and series on this list span continents. From a dorm room in Ontario to a startup in Stockholm to the garages of California, covering everything from the birth of personal computing to the implosion of the sharing economy. The best of them understand that the real drama was never about the technology. It was always about the people building it and what it cost them. Here are the best screen adaptations of real tech companies worth your time.
1. The Social Network (2010)
This is the gold standard of tech biopics. David Fincher’s film about the founding of Facebook is as much about ambition and betrayal as it is about technology and Aaron Sorkin’s screenplay turns depositions into theatre. Jesse Eisenberg’s portrayal of Mark Zuckerberg is cold, brilliant and utterly isolated and remains one of his greatest screen performances. Whether the film is factually accurate is debated; whether it is compulsively watchable is not. And with its sequel, The Social Reckoning, on then horizon it is an essential watch this year.
Where to watch: Prime Video
2. Blackberry (2023)
This is the best tech film most people have not seen. Blackberry tells the rise and fall of Research In Motion and the smartphone it invented, with a sharp eye for the gap between the engineers who built the device and the businessmen who thought they could sell it forever. Matt Johnson and Jay Baruchel are outstanding as the mismatched founders of one of the most avoidable corporate collapses in tech history.
Where to watch: Jio Hotstar and Prime Video
3. Steve Jobs (2015)
This is a different kind of biopic. Sorkin’s screenplay breaks it into three acts that follow three very popular product launches and function almost entirely on dialogue. Michael Fassbender plays Steve Jobs and summons his infamous reality distortion field with utter conviction. The film uses the theatrical structure to examine his relationships with colleagues, family and collaborators in ways a conventional biopic never could. Kate Winslet is exceptional as Joanna Hoffman. Directed by Danny Boyle, this is a film that rewards multiple viewings.
Where to watch: Jio Hotstar, Prime Video and Apple TV
4. Pirates of the Silicon Valley (1999)
This 1999 film covers the early years of both Apple and Microsoft, focusing on Steve Jobs and Bill Gates with a scrappy energy that feels appropriate for its subject matter. Noah Wyle’s Jobs is surprisingly compelling and the film’s take on how Apple’s ideas ended up powering Microsoft’s rise is presented with just enough scepticism to be interesting. It is a useful primer on the founding mythology of modern computing.
Where to watch: Prime Video and YouTube
5. Jobs (2013)
Ashton Kutcher’s portrayal of Steve Jobs is more straightforward than Fassbender’s and the film is a more conventional biopic for it, covering Jobs’s life from his college years through to the launch of the iPod. It lacks the structural ambition of the 2015 film and Sorkin’s dialogue, but it is a competent and watchable account of the Apple story that hits the major moments without getting too lost in myth.
6. General Magic (2018)
The documentary about General Magic, the forgotten tech startup that spun out of Apple in the early 1990s is one of the most quietly devastating films in this list. The company’s alumni include future leaders from Google, eBay, LinkedIn and Android, and yet the company itself collapsed spectacularly. The film’s access to original footage from inside the company makes it uniquely intimate. A film about failure that ends up being entirely about what Silicon Valley’s ambitions actually cost the people inside them.
Where to watch: Youtube
7. Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber (2022)
This series based on Mike Isaac’s book about Travis Kalanick and Uber’s toxic rise is the most visceral portrait of startup culture on this list. Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Kalanick as a man who built a company in his own image and was eventually consumed by it. The series does not let anyone off easily, which is what makes it compelling. If you have ever wondered how a company with Uber’s dysfunction grew to that scale, this is your answer.
Where to watch: Jio Hotstar
8. WeCrashed (2022)
The Apple TV+ series about WeWork and Adam Neumann is as much a love story as it is a corporate disaster story, which gives it a texture that Super Pumped lacks. Jared Leto and Anne Hathaway are both committed to their roles in ways that go well beyond what the material strictly requires. The series is at its best when it examines how Neumann’s charisma operated as a kind of mass hallucination that investors, employees and even the media happily participated in.
Where to watch: Prime Video
9. The Playlist (2022)
Netflix’s Swedish limited series about the founding of Spotify is one of the more formally inventive entries on this list. Each episode focuses on a different character, and the same events are seen from multiple perspectives, including Daniel Ek, the music industry and an artist fighting to be paid fairly. It is sharply critical of the streaming model in ways that a more sympathetic production might have avoided. If you stream music and have ever wondered who actually won, this series will give you an uncomfortable answer.
Where to watch: Netlfix
10. Downloaded (2013)
Alex Winter’s documentary about Napster and Shawn Fanning is the definitive account of how a college student with a file-sharing idea changed the music industry permanently and was destroyed by it. The film benefits from interviews with Fanning, Sean Parker and several key industry figures and it resists the temptation to either glorify or simply condemn its subjects. A foundational story for anyone who wants to understand how digital distribution disrupted creative industries before anyone had the vocabulary for it.
Where to watch: YouTube
Technically this is a fictional series but it is so clearly drawn from the personal computing and early internet era that it belongs on this list. Set in 1980s Texas and later Silicon Valley, it follows a group of engineers and entrepreneurs building hardware, software and eventually the web. It is the most emotionally sophisticated portrayal of what it feels like to build something new and why the people who do it are often impossible to live with. It is in my opinion one of the best television series made
Where to watch: Netflix and Prime Video