This is the first in a series of articles about Historical Biopics and Historical Events that cover a certain topic. For this first article, we’ll be covering the Best Tech Biopics that tell the life story of a prominent technology leader, a technology itself or an event where technology significantly changed the course of history.
Some of the more famous Historical Biopics About Tech have covered technology industry titans such as Steve Jobs founder of Apple, Bill Gates founder of Microsoft, Mark Zuckerberg founder of Facebook / Meta, and Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsille the founders of Blackberry. While these Biopics have covered recent technologies, other films have focused on the earlier days of computing with The Imitation Game (2014) which featured the creation of the first computer by Alan Turing and Micro Men (2009) which covered the rivalry between early British computer makers Sir Clive Sinclair (ZX Spectrum) and Chris Curry (BBC Micro).
Technology biopics will also cover infamous people who have used technology to facilitate criminal activity. Examples of these types of Tech Biopics include Takedown (2000) which covered the life of hacker Kevin Mitnick and Silk Road (2021) which was about Ross Ulbricht’s creation of an underground internet market for illegal drugs.
For our Top 10, we’re going to focus on Biopics that specifically cover topics of technology or technology leaders. However, there are quite a few Biopics that have technology tangentially associated with their narratives, and we’ll outline those below (and we encourage you to also check out those great films).
Our complete list of Historical Biopics features over 940+ films from 1942 – 2023 and our complete list of Historical Event Films features over 502+ films from 1962 – 2023. Both lists include most films dealing with an historical event or person. If you don’t see a film in these lists, it might also be in our Docudramas list. As we’ll be releasing more topic specific articles about persons or events that helped shaped history, subscribe to our newsletter to get updated as we release future articles and add the latest historical films to these collections.
Biopics with tech elements that didn’t make our list: Rogue Trader (1999), Flash of Genius (2008), Jobs (2013), The Fifth Estate (2013), Snowden (2016), Hidden Figures (2016), The Spacewalker (2017), Salyut-7 (2017), First Man (2018), The Current War (2018), Tesla (2020) and Lamborghini: The Man Behind the Legend (2022).
We have embedded a compilation video of our Best Tech Biopics and more details on these films can be found in the list below. Note: We are a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for us to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites.
