This ‘Always Sunny’ Bit Is At Least As Good As Glenn Howerton’s BlackBerry Movie Will Be
Yesterday, Entertainment Weekly reported that Glenn Howerton of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia fame will play Jim Balsillie, the former co-CEO of Canadian smartphone giant BlackBerry, in a film simply titled BlackBerry — but Always Sunny fans know that we’ve already seen Howerton act like he invented the smartphone.
In Season 11 of Always Sunny, an episode titled “Frank Falls Out the Window” showed Frank Reynolds lose the last 10 years of his memory due to the aforementioned window incident, and Danny DeVito’s delightful degenerate spent the entire episode thinking he was still in 2006. Howerton’s Dennis and Kaitlin Olson’s Dee attempted to exploit the amnesia by wowing Frank with their smartphones, and they nearly secured a sizable investment from their fake father by pretending that they had invented the technology popularized by Balsillie and BlackBerry shortly before Apple demolished the once-great empire like the Always Sunny gang demolishes the lives of everyone they meet.
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It’s a downright tragedy that the creatives behind BlackBerry can find financial backing for a movie about a phone brand that went belly up but Mac, Charlie, Dee, Dennis and Frank have to self-fund Lethal Weapons 5, 6 and 7.
“The movie is about the rise and fall of the company Research in Motion that created the BlackBerry,” said Howerton of Blackberry. The actor explained that he was drawn to “the interesting and fascinating ways in which they rose to the top of the market, and singled out the BlackBerry as the most important phone in the world to have, and made it such a desirable device. And, of course, the hubris of thinking you've figured it all out, and then something comes in like the iPhone and sweeps it all away from you before you realize it.” Howerton even had his co-star Charlie Day shave his head on the Always Sunny Podcast to better embody the bald Balsillie after deciding that a phony bald cap wouldn’t cut it.
A Social Network-style story about the rise and fall of a phone that was the universal symbol of “workaholic divorced dad” in films during the 2000s doesn’t sound quite as appealing as watching Dee and Dennis accidentally get hooked on crack again and have their dreams crushed after realizing the check Frank cut them was dated for 2006, but BlackBerry could very well surprise us and become a box office success — until someone releases yet another Steve Jobs movie and puts BlackBerry out of business.
