Apple TV+’s “The Morning Show” stars Academy Award winner Reese Witherspoon, Emmy winner Jennifer Aniston and Golden Globe winner Steve Carell in a high-stakes drama that promises to pull back the curtain on the morning news.
Sangeeta Singh-Kurtz for Quartz:
At $15 million per installment, the final season of HBO’s Game of Thrones was the most expensive TV season in history on a per-episode basis. That was until Apple started making its own TV shows.
Apple’s content budget for its upcoming streaming service, Apple+, is as much as $6 billion, according to the Financial Times… A good chunk of that will help pay for The Morning Show, a series about the behind-the-scenes drama at an American morning talk show. The Financial Times is reporting that each episode of the Apple series will cost even more than the $15 million it required to make an episode of the final season of HBO’s Thrones.
The Hollywood Reporter divulged last year that the tech giant is paying “upward of $1.25 million per episode to stars Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon.” By contrast, even the biggest stars on Game of Thrones were making only about $500,000 per episode, while most others made closer to $100,000 or less.
MacDailyNews Take: Yes, the likes of Jennifer Aniston, Reese Witherspoon, and Steve Carell do command large salaries.
This series, with a long upfront two-year commitment from Apple, is obviously meant to be a tentpole for Apple TV+. We believe The Morning Show will deliver millions of Apple TV+ subscribers!
