It feels like another sign of the end of America’s mass popular culture.
So, Apple has its own production company making content for Apple TV. They’ve made some gripping series, including a great adaptation of Mick Herron’s Slough House series of spy novels, Slow Horses. They’ve had the Tom Hanks-produced series Masters of the Air, which follows the American bombers of World War II, and the wonderfully taut mini-series Hijack featuring Idris Elba. The biggest hit has probably been Ted Lasso.
There’s a strange connective “sheen” to all Apple TV productions, save perhaps for Slow Horses.
But I’m very curious about the economics of this service. Less than 10 percent of Americans are subscribed to Apple TV, even by the most generous standards. And yet, some of these original films must be sizably budgeted. But you hear so little about them at all. I came back from a vacation and suddenly discovered a Doug Liman-directed Boston heist-comedy featuring Matt Damon and Casey Affleck. In the old Hollywood days, that’s an $100-$120 million proposition, and you were probably looking for a $60 million opening weekend and good buzz to carry it through, maybe praying that international audiences and circulation on HBO and streaming put it into comfortably profitable territory. But it’s not quite a Hollywood picture either. It’s somehow more thick with great character actors and cameos, and slightly baggier/looser in the writing.
Soon, a Brad Pitt and George Clooney film is coming directly to the service without a pit stop in theaters. Apple has the spare cash to run an unprofitable version of Hollywood within itself. But, right now the theaters are starving for content. This summer saw big weekends for old movies like The Lion King and Hayao Miyazaki’s Ponyo. I quite like seeing films return to theaters for special runs, but this is driven by a dearth of content that is partly due to the strike, and partly due to walled-garden streaming services.
It feels like another sign of the end of America’s mass popular culture.