So What Does Apple TV+ Do In Original Films Now?

A Miles Teller/Anya Taylor-Joy movie from the director of The Black Phone with a score from Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross dropped on Apple TV+ this month over Presidents’ Day weekend. It’s entitled The Gorge and chances are, you didn’t know it existed until reading this piece. Heck, I keep track of all movie release date news and even I was shocked to recently learn it was dropping with minimal fanfare on the service on February 14. Such is the life of streaming movies, especially ones plopping onto services with limited subscriber bases and pop culture reach like Apple TV+. A little over five years into existing, Apple TV+ has launched a handful of hit TV shows (Slow Horses, Severance, Ted Lasso), but like all the streamers, has found tremendous difficulty launching hit movies. If Netflix can’t get successful films off the ground to save its life, of course Apple TV+ is failing at this initiative too.

Apple TV+ appears to be at a crossroads when it comes to developing and releasing motion pictures. Where does this streamer go from here in its original film ambitions?

Jamie Erlicht and Zack Van Amburg. No, those aren’t the names of protagonists from a long-forgotten ABC sitcom. They’re the duo in charge of Apple TV+ programming. These two Sony Pictures Television veterans have corralled all Apple TV+ productions since 2017, including original movies. That right there is already a major problem that’s been ingrained into Apple TV+’s movies from the start. For starters, there is no dedicated division or leadership specifically overseeing movie production. Erlich and Van Amburg have to juggle an annual movie slate with an extensive collection of TV shows. That’s a lot of programming to handle, no wonder quality control is practically non-existent.

For another thing, the duo doesn’t have any experience in motion pictures. They’re television guys who are suddenly tasked with not just making classical “TV movies” (though that’s what 99% of streaming features look and act like anyway) but $200+ million genre movies with movie stars. How on Earth are they supposed to know how to handle something like Argylle? It’d be like handing me a skateboard right now and expecting me to be Tony Hawk. Apple TV+’s motion picture struggles were inevitable just from the corporate side of things.

However, the streamer has also constantly fumbled in this department in terms of the movies it’s produced. When Apple TV+ was first getting off the ground, reports emerged that Apple’s head honchos (namely Tim Cook) didn’t want the streamer to do anything too transgressive. Spiritual elements of shows like Servant were reportedly toned down to avoid offending Christians. Shows with more explicit content, involving sex and drugs, were allegedly shut down entirely. Since then, Apple TV+ has made slight inroads to offering more adult material, such as the bleak Killers of the Flower Moon or the sporadically uber-horny Napoleon. However, the Apple TV+ movie line-up still clearly suffers from an overabundance of shininess and lack of rough edges.

Unless an auteur like Ridley Scott or Martin Scorsese is around to challenge things, Apple TV+ movies never look like anything that could make shareholders quiver in a quarterly earnings report. These films can have explosions, but sex is off-limits, ditto any violence that’s too gruesome. If you couldn’t show a clip from a non-award season movie in an Apple store during the day, it can’t go on Apple TV+. No wonder Kick-Ass and Kingsman veteran Matthew Vaughn ended up helming a PG-13 action film for the studio!

To boot, Apple TV+ doesn’t do tiny movies (unless it’s the occasional film festival acquisition like Hala, Fancy Dance, or CODA). Perhaps to reinforce the idea of Apple as a “premium brand,” Apple TV+ movies must have big stars and even larger budgets (the latter also stemming from the streamer paying out actors upfront for when titles debut directly on streaming). That’s a problem because the biggest things people like on streaming tend to be trashy, throwaway material. There’s a reason Hot Frosty got way more viewership than Maestro on Netflix, for instance. 365 Days got way more traction and memes than The Greatest Beer Run Ever.

You won’t find any Hallmark-esque holiday-themed movies on Apple TV+, nor smaller-scale features that could launch movie stars rather than building off pre-existing fanbases. It’s all part of Apple’s film strategy of relying on the familiar and not “sullying” the Apple brand with “lowbrow” material like The Christmas Prince. That’s a hysterical strategy given that Apple TV+’s original movie initiative has instead connected the Apple brand with critically lambasted turkeys like Ghosted, Emancipation, Cherry, or Argylle. Hooray for brand management!

A deluge of bad and costly movies have (GASP!) led to Apple TV+’s original films becoming especially derided in a sea of terrible streaming features. That reputation was only exacerbated when Apple TV+ launched a quartet of movies into theaters between late 2022 and July 2023. These titles carried bloated budgets because they were originally intended for streaming (with the exception of Killers of the Flower Moon, which was always expensive).” That’s how Fly Me to the Moon had a $100 million price tag while Blink Twice cost $20 million and Anyone but You only cost $25 million.

Shockingly, putting uber-expensive movies with limited appeal like Argylle into theaters didn’t turn into a recipe for success. Apple TV+’s limited model for what one of its movies “should” look like was always doomed to fail in theaters. How on Earth was Argylle ever expected to make back its $200 million budget, especially when it looked like it was made for ten grand? Eventually, Apple TV+ changed course on sending its movies to theaters, which included jettisoning a big screen launch for George Clooney and Brad Pitt’s Wolfs just weeks before it was set to hit multiplexes everywhere. After this, Wolfs director Jon Watts announced he wasn’t planning on working with this company anymore because he “couldn’t trust them” after they backtracked on committing to a theatrical Wolfs release.

That brings us to the dawn of 2025. Apple TV+’s original films have been plagued by excessive costs, bad buzz on all fronts, and the division has now alienated certain filmmakers. Apple TV+ has also been awful quiet in the department of acquiring and green-lighting new movies. Most of its upcoming films, including Matchbox, Mayday, and Fountain of Youth, are co-productions with Skydance Media, as were The Gorge and Ghosted. With that entity about to acquire Paramount Pictures, it’s doubtful Skydance will be a reliable supplier of movies to Apple for long. Meanwhile, Apple TV+ getting shut out of the 97th Academy Awards indicates that the streamer won’t be replicating the Best Picture win of CODA anytime soon.

Apple reportedly being close to acquiring the next movie (some UFO-themed political thriller) from F1 director Joseph Kosinski indicates the streamer isn’t out of the film business by a long shot. However, it just doesn’t look like Apple will be a major player in the near future of cinema. An occasional masterpiece like Killers of the Flower Moon (which is entirely based on Martin Scorsese’s talent rather than an Apple being a haven for artists) can’t disguise the streamer’s endless problems with launching successful movies. Something like The Gorge that vanishes the moment it drops isn’t an anomaly, it’s a microcosm of a larger issue.

Apple Original Films was always one cog in a larger machine (why else would it not have designated leadership?) that’s uncaring of art and the people who produce it. These are the inevitable problems that emerge when saddling tech and TV veterans with running a movie studio. It’s also the inescapable outcome of a studio that thinks it’s better to spend $200 million on Argylle rather than spending $20 million each on ten smaller, more challenging original productions. Embracing excessive costs, poor corporate structure, bad movies, and forgoing risk — that’s how you end up with an outfit like Apple Original Films stuck in a state of weird limbo. That’s another problem. Like so many streaming outfits, Apple’s movies looked like knock-offs of classic theatrical movie successes. They were star-studded mimics of superior classic movies rather than exciting new productions. That won’t be changing anytime soon since forthcoming original Apple films are running on the fumes of past Ryan Reynolds, Mattel, and adventurer movies.

Given all these issues, is it any surprise most people don’t even know Apple’s film division really exists, let alone spend time wondering what it does next? Oh, and Apple Original Films having the worst studio logo of all-time just solidifies why this outfit is so forgettable. All the Apple money in the world can’t help the outfit behind The Gorge (which apparently exists) from its endless problems with launching movies people have actually heard of or like.