The story of Canadian smartphone pioneer BlackBerry will be the subject of a forthcoming documentary from Mark Wahlberg’s unscripted prodco Unrealistic Ideas.

The documentary, which is currently in production, was spearheaded by Toronto-based social-first marketing firm Viral Nation, which brought the project to Unrealistic Ideas and recruited filmmaker Eddie Schmidt (This Film is Not Yet Rated) to direct.

The doc will tell the inside story of how a tech company based in Windsor, Ont. outpaced global corporate behemoths in the race to bring smartphones to the world, until it was sent into decline by its own cloistered internal culture and the deep pockets and more far-sighted perspective of its big-name competitors.

It will feature never-before-seen archive and exclusive access to the members of the Research in Motion (BlackBerry) Alumni Association, which includes dozens of key executives who were present at the earliest stages of the company.

Wahlberg, Stephen Levinson, Archie Gips and David Wendell are serving as producers on the project for Unrealistic Ideas, while Colin McRae and Neil Desai will produce for Viral Nation. WME represents Unrealistic Ideas, while helmer Schmidt is represented by CAA.

The BlackBerry company’s early history was previously dramatized in Matt Johnson’s scripted feature BlackBerry (Rhombus Media, Zapruder Films), which premiered at the 2023 Berlin International Film Festival and was broadcast on CBC last November in an extended limited series.

This story originally appeared in Realscreen

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