Apple TV+ has a busy March. Ridley Scott’s Napoleon launches on the service starring Joaquin Phoenix as the great man. There’s Kristen Wiig’s new comedy Palm Royale, about Palm Beach society in the late 1960s. And there’s Manhunt, a show that could only appear on Apple TV+, with Tobias Menzies playing Edwin Stanton, Abraham Lincoln’s secretary of war, trying to hunt down the ex-president’s killer John Wilkes Booth.
It follows February’s drop of the heavily Oscar-nominated but zero Oscar-winning Martin Scorsese film Killers of the Flower Moon – a movie that grossed $137 million against a budget of $200 million. For most studios, this would be a deep breath moment. But at the start of February, Apple’s first quarter results saw the company post revenue of $119.6 billion, up 2 percent year over year. It has $162 billion in the bank. It’s currently valued at $2.7 trillion. It can absorb the pain.
The question Hollywood keeps asking is – why would it? It’s making so much money through its other business, the TV operation seems an unusual diversification. Apple is now in a peculiar place. On the one hand, Apple TV+ excels at what GQ recently called Prestige Dad TV. It’s home to projects from Steven Spielberg, Tom Hanks, Martin Scorsese, Michael Douglas, Gary Oldman, Idris Elba, Ridley Scott, Matthew Vaughn, Samuel L Jackson, Brad Pitt and George Clooney. Stars and creatives are lining up to work with them, just as they did with HBO in the 2010s. It’s a safe, non-interfering and highly lucrative home for their latest passion projects.
The company is spending $1 billion annually on movies destined for cinemas and $6.5 billion on TV programming. The budget for season one of the cerebral sci-fi series Foundation was $45 million – which is around the same as the most expensive BBC TV show to date, His Dark Materials, but small fry compared with The Morning Show’s $15 million per episode. Apple has also been buying up projects others can no longer afford. Masters of the Air was in development at HBO from 2013 but in 2019 Apple acquired it when HBO balked at the $250 million price tag.
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