After spending more than $20 billion to produce original TV shows and movies – many of which reap much hardware during awards seasons, but also which relatively few have seen – Apple is reportedly starting to rein in production budgets.
Lucas Shaw for Bloomberg News:
Based on interviews with more than a dozen people, including former employees, current employees and business partners, Apple services boss Eddy Cue has been having regular meetings with studio chiefs Zack Van Amburg and Jamie Erlicht to go over budgets, pushing them to exert more control over spending on projects. Van Amburg and Erlicht have told some of their top creative partners that they want to change their reputation as the biggest spender in town, according to these people.
The studio spent more than $500 million combined on movies from directors Martin Scorsese, Ridley Scott and Matthew Vaughn, and upward of $250 million on the World War II miniseries Masters of the Air, one of more than a dozen new series released this year.
Those pictures were all disappointments at the box office, and only Killers of the Flower Moon registered in Nielsen’s rankings of the most-popular streaming titles. Masters of the Air delivered a smaller US audience than House of Ninjas, a Netflix show in Japanese, according to Nielsen. Even so, it’s the only new Apple show this year to appear in Nielsen’s rankings.
Apple is spending billions of dollars a year on original programming that has received strong reviews and many awards nominations. But its streaming service is attracting just 0.2% of TV viewing in the US. Apple TV+ generates less viewing in one month than Netflix does in one day.
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MacDailyNews Take: Apple TV+ gets tremendous bang for its buck and will continue doing so. If the company ever gets around to launching its as-supported tier that our little birdie keeps chirping about, Apple TV+ will finally see significant growth and the quality content offered by Apple TV+ will be widely seen. Apple can finance Apple TV+, even increasing spending above current levels, basically forever.
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Over the next 10 years, I see entertainment moving into the Virtual Reality realm (once the hardware catches up) . . . So, instead of sitting on the couch watching Netflix with your friends on your 75 inch TV, you “explore a Haunted House” with your friends (using Apple Glasses or whatever the future technology is) . . . With that in mind, I think in upcoming years, Apple will de-prioritize their investment in 2D static Netflix style programming . . . A number of factors will determine “when” that shift happens.
Humans have always had both active and passive entertainment. If you go back 20 000 years, sometimes people were jumping and dancing around the fire, sometimes they were passively sitting and listening to a storyteller. As a species we need both forms of entertainment, and no amount of technology can change that. How much time is spent on each type may vary, and what you described can be the future of casual gaming and escape rooms but it’s not the future of TV/cinema.
If you haven’t watched Masters of the Air, you missed something special. It was very well done.