With Best Picture nominee CODA and the tremendous Shakespeare adaptation The Tragedy of Macbeth, Apple TV+ originals have officially stomped their way into the big leagues.
And, checking out the mega-tech company’s slate for 2022 and beyond, it seems the hits will just keep coming. New films will debut from creators as diverse and celebrated as Will Smith and Antoine Fuqua, Alfonso Cuaron and Bill Murray, Scorsese and Scott, Jennifer Lawrence…phew, the list goes on.
Cha Cha Real Smooth will be one of the first exciting Apple Originals of the year, the sophomore feature from indie director Cooper Raiff: it stars Dakota Johnson and Raiff himself, as respectively a young mum and the bat mitzvah DJ she befriends.
Perhaps most hotly anticipated, Martin Scorsese’s upcoming serial killer period drama Killers Of The Flower Moon will arrive later in the year, starring the director’s two muses Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro.
Other auteurs getting set to release Apple Originals include action director Matthew Vaughn (Argylle, starring Henry Cavill, Sam Rockwell, and pop star Dua Lipa), Antoine Fuqua’s slavery drama Emancipation (with Will Smith), and a new Ridley Scott film starring the one and only Joaquin Phoenix as Napoleon Bonaparte, with Vanessa Kirby as his Josephine. Damn.
In fact, biopics make up a hefty percentage of Apple’s upcoming slate, with Jennifer Lawrence getting ready to play both Elizabeth Holmes in an Adam McKay film and legendary talent agent Sue Mengers in an as-yet untitled project. There’s films on Audrey Hepburn, on the creator of Tetris, and Zac Efron and Russell Crowe in the true story of a man who headed to Vietnam in 1968 to grab a beer with his buddies.
Apple’s documentaries offer a clear-eyed view of the world, with Black and Blues: The Colourful Ballad of Louis Armstrong and Bond doco The Sound of 007 illuminating beloved music. Oprah Winfrey will produce a doco on the life and career of the late Sidney Poitier, and two-parter Number One on the Call Sheet tells the stories of Black men and women making Hollywood history.
Kids both little and grown-up shouldn’t feel left out, either, with two sweet animated efforts arriving soon—Luck, about the unluckiest girl in the world, and Spellbound, about a broken magical kingdom—plus a comedy about the Beanie Baby collecting craze starring Zach Galafianakis, Elizabeth Banks, and Sarah Snook.
Plus, as if we haven’t heard this story enough in our lifetimes, Ryan Reynolds and Octavia Spencer will sing A Christmas Carol in the form of Spirited, a “modern musical rendition” of Dickens’ much-adapted story. God bless us (and Apple TV+), everyone!
