Oscar winner Tom Hanks joins NBC’s TODAY co-anchor Hoda Kotb to talk about how he and his wife Rita Wilson are doing after contracting COVID-19, as well as about his new film, Greyhound, a World War II drama debuting on Apple TV+ on July 10th.
Hanks clarified earlier comments reported by The Guardian regarding Greyhound which, uh, may have been misconstrued.
I’m actually thrilled that Apple TV+ is making it possible for everybody to see it… the day after my 64th birthday, thank you very much! (laughs)
This is a magnificent gift that’s come to us because of Apple because COVID-19 did something heartbreaking to us all: it closed down the theaters. We don’t have the cinema. There isn’t anybody that doesn’t like going to see a good movie with 800 other people and coming out with something in common.
Barring that, Apple has saved the day for us. We had a magnificent movie that was not going to be seen… Apple is a benevolent streaming service in every way. It’s going to look fantastic, but it’s going to be available. It is going to be viewable, and otherwise we would’ve languished in a vault for a movie that, look, it’s 88 minutes of a thematic story that does speak to what we’re all going through right now. We didn’t know that at the time we made the film, we were just trying to make a lean, spare, new version of procedures and behaviors about how difficult it was to stay alive in the North Atlantic in 1942…
Thank goodness that there is, you can pay – how much is Apple TV cost, staff? (shouts offscreen) – five bucks. It’s a cheap, it’s a magnificent deal and we are going to be able to fill up the screens in the living rooms and the bean-bag chairs of the world all in one fell shot, so we feel as though we were rescued at sea by a convoy with a big Apple logo with a bite taken out of it.”
Hanks’ Greyhound comments begin around 8:08 in the video below:
MacDailyNews Take: Obviously, the Apple’s “cruel whipmasters” have quickly whipped Hanks’ remote press junket game right back into tip-top shape. 🙂
Moral of the story: When someone pays $70 million to distribute your work, say nice things.