The Apple TV app tries to do too much. It tries to be too much. And this lack of focus damages the Apple TV+ streaming service. Still, a design change in iOS 14.3 and the iPad equivalent makes it just a little bit easier for subscribers to find Apple TV+ shows and movies.
The small tweak doesn’t go far enough, though. It’s only a tiny step in the right direction. What’s truly needed is a dedicated Apple TV+ app.
Apple CEO Tim Cook reportedly stepped in to squash an Apple TV+ series that would have chronicled the rise of controversial blogging network Gawker Media.
Earlier this year, Vanity Fair reported that Apple TV+ execs were working with former Gawker writers Max Read and Cord Jefferson, among others, on the series. Not much in the way of details were published. However, it sounds like it could have been a scripted show about the “glory days” of a blog known for “skewering the powerful.”
One of the potential problems? Apple and Cook could have been among the powerful in question.
Wolfwalkers, the animated movie that arrives on Apple TV+ today, is the best animated film of 2020. A fiery mix of folklore and feminism, it’s one of the most astonishing works of visual art you’re likely to see this year.
It comes from the makers of gorgeous animated features The Secret of Kells and The Breadwinner — and it marks their strongest work to date.
Julia Roberts is the latest star putting in an appearance on Apple TV+. She’ll reportedly take the lead in an adaptation of the mystery-thriller The Last Thing He Told Me.
Update November 12, 2021: Jennifer Garner has replaced Julia Roberts as the lead in this upcoming series.
Apple has secured the rights to a new scripted anthology series about climate change called Extrapolations.
According to trade publication Variety, the series will reveal the “intimate, unanticipated stories of how the upcoming changes to our planet will affect love, faith, work and family on a personal and human scale.”
The series is created by Scott Z. Burns, a screenwriter, producer and director who wrote The Bourne Ultimatum and Contagion. He also produced the Academy Award-winning climate change documentary An Inconvenient Truth.
Apple could have to ensure that 30 percent of Apple TV+ content is produced in Europe in order to sell in that market, suggests new potential regulation in the works.
Under the General Scheme of the Online Safety and Media Regulation Bill, which has not yet been passed, all streaming platforms would have to abide by these rules.
Apple TV+ snapped up the rights to Blake Crouch’s excellent quantum-tinged parallel universe thriller Dark Matter. Crouch, whose Wayward Pines novels were turned into a sci-fi show of the same name, will adapt his 2016 novel for screen.
The New York Times bestseller Dark Matter follows the story of Jason Dessen, a family man and high-school physics teacher. Walking home one night, Dessen is abducted by a masked stranger and injected with a drug. When he wakes up, he finds that he’s living in a world in which he’s unmarried and has achieved astonishing professional success.
Apple TV+ is clearly confident about For All Mankind. The alternate-history sci-fi series got a green light for a third season on Tuesday. And that’s months before the second season debuts on Apple’s streaming video service.
The show depicts a different version of the space race — one that begins with the USSR beating the US to the Earth’s moon.
Season two of Tehran, the excellent spy drama whose first season just wrapped up on Apple TV+, is underway — although Apple has yet to give it the official go-ahead.
“I can say that we are working on the second season,” said Julien Leroux, CEO and founder of production company Paper Entertainment. “It’s not been officially greenlit, but we are working on it, so hopefully we’ll have some good news by the end of the year.”
Apple’s video streaming service is hitting the waves. It ordered a documentary series that offers a behind-the-scenes look at the aspirations, failures and accomplishments of the world’s best surfers as they compete in the World Surf League championship.