Watching Apple gate their movies so heavily behind their streaming service is a bummer. Reports suggest Apple Original Films is abandoning wide theatrical distribution in favor of negligible theatrical qualifying runs before appearing on Apple TV+. If closing the door on theaters wasn’t enough, Apple has never released Blu-rays for any of their films, and most aren’t available for rental or even digital purchase. Relegated away from most common distribution platforms to a sixth place streaming service, far fewer people will ever watch Apple-financed films.
Some might question if that’s a real loss given Apple’s iffy track record across critical pans and financial flops like Argylle and Ghosted. But I give credit to Apple as a financier behind top tier talent crafting original stories. It’s a strategy once commonplace in the early 2000s and earlier, but an anomaly in today’s four quadrant IP landscape.
There’s an audience that wants to see director Doug Liman (The Bourne Identity, Mr. & Mrs. Smith) team up with Matt Damon again on a heist thriller (The Instigators), Ridley Scott goes big in another historical war drama (Napoleon), and Denzel Washington doing art house Shakespeare (The Tragedy of Macbeth). While the challenging theatrical landscape of 2024 doesn’t justify the same wide rollout plan as 2001 or even 2017, there’s a space for all these titles across theaters, physical media, and rentals. So it’s not overly sentimental to suggest Apple’s gatekeeping contributes to an overall decline in cinema, at the least the kind of original cinema once commonplace.
And even amongst forgettable drek Apple Original Films can still release high quality work. Wolfwalkers, The Tragedy of Macbeth, and Causeway had multiple Oscar nominations and made several critics’ best of the year lists. Scorsese’s crime epic Killers of the Flower Moon has been regularly hailed as a masterpiece, topping many critics polls and awards nominations from practically every critics circle. None of these films are available on physical media or for digital rental, and I doubt anyone would have seen a theatrical run with Apple’s new strategy – a shame.
However, I’m not naive to tech corporations taking self interested actions. As hardware sales slow, Apple wants to build reliable service revenue through Apple TV+; aggressively building up a film library to attract new subscribers makes financial sense. Most of their wide theatrical releases have also significantly underperformed at the box office, generating the kind of rare negative PR that Apple is especially sensitive to. And would we expect Apple, a company so tech-forward it eliminated disk and CD drives on its hardware years ahead of its PC rivals, to distribute its films on Blu-rays?
Yet Apple purports itself as a different tech company, one that supports creative professionals, regularly markets itself as the obvious choice for filmmakers, and whose artistic sensibilities set industry standards. As Steve Jobs once put it, Apple stands at the intersection of technology and liberal arts.
Is it too much to ask that Apple-financed films are eventually available for rental so that those willing to pay six bucks to Apple can do so to watch their movies? Or that, especially for the most critically revered releases like Killers of the Flower Moon, Apple might loosen up and collaborate with a boutique label to do a small print on Blu-ray? Or can a light George Clooney Brad Pitt vehicle like Wolfs get a few weeks in a theater near you before disappearing forever into the black hole of the streaming algorithm?
I’m pretty confident Apple can finesse its “all in” strategy on Apple TV+ while providing several outside revenue streams that won’t even amount to a rounding error on its profit margin. They might even gain new subscribers who are curious to watch more of what Apple produces. The alternative, a world where works from Scorsese, Scott, and Joel Coen are practically locked away forever on a niche streaming site, is dismal.