Danny Boyle's biopic of the Apple founder, Steve Jobs, has taken just $7.3 million at the U.S. box office in its opening week, less than a third of the film's production costs, the BBC reports.
The film, simply titled Steve Jobs, looked set to be a hit and recorded the best per-theater average of 2015 earlier in October, when it opened at four U.S. theaters as part of a slow rollout to generate a buzz prior to its general release and took in more than $130,000 in each one.
However, in its first week of general release, the film took less than half of the takings of Ridley Scott's space thriller The Martian, which claimed the top spot in the box office and brought in $15.9 million. Steve Jobs entered the box office in seventh position.
According to U.S. culture magazine Variety, the film, which stars Michael Fassbender in the lead role, was expected to make as much as $19 million in its opening week. Variety predicted that the film would need to make at least $120 million in order to cover production and marketing costs.
The film focuses on several key points in Jobs's career, including the launch of Apple's first Macintosh computer in 1984. It has also proved controversial, however, for its presentation of Jobs's character and family life. The Wall Street Journal reported that Jobs's widow, Laurene Powell Jobs, lobbied the film's production companies to kill it as it presented an unfair depiction of the technology guru.
The biopic has generally received a warm reception from critics, receiving an 85 percent 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.
But Apple's current chief executive, Tim Cook, panned films about Jobs as "opportunistic" while admitting that he had not watched any of them. Another film focusing on the Apple founder, Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine, opened in the U.S. in September and has grossed almost $500,000 so far, according to film website IMDb.
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