EXCLUSIVE: While Apple will continue to have an agreement with Skydance Media to try to make live-action films and TV shows, Apple is parting ways with Skydance Animation, the company run by former Pixar executive John Lassiter. Their multi-year contract has come to an end, and Apple is producing other types of films, including the first film, which will be released this weekend. Killers of the Flower Moonwhich opens worldwide on Friday.
Skydance Animation will quickly reach a new deal and Apple will return the project to the company. Enchantedwhich was installed on Apple TV+, but will not be implemented.
Skydance and Apple will remain partners on a number of upcoming feature films and TV series, but mutually agreed that an animated film would not be the best fit for Apple’s expanding slate of narrative-driven Original Films.
Apple TV+ actively collaborates with Skydance Media, as well as such famous popular Skydance series as Foundation, Big Door Award and an upcoming comedy reuniting stars Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey, created by David West Reed.
Upcoming Apple Original Movies produced by Skydance Media include Family plan, an action-comedy starring Mark Wahlberg and directed by Simon Cellan Jones; genre-bending action movie Gorge starring Miles Teller and Anya Taylor-Joy; And may Day, a new feature film written and directed by Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley and starring Ryan Reynolds and Kenneth Branagh. Apple Original Films and Skydance also recently released the romantic action-adventure film Spooks, starring Chris Evans and Ana de Armas and directed by Dexter Fletcher.
Besides Killers of the Flower MoonMartin Scorsese drama starring Robert De Niro, Leonardo DiCaprio and Lily Gladstone, ready for release at Apple Napoleonepic directed by Ridley Scott starring Joaquin Phoenix and Vanessa Kirby; and a spy thriller directed by Matthew Vaughn Argyll with Henry Cavill, Sam Rockwell, Bryce Dallas Howard, Bryan Cranston, Catherine O’Hara, John Cena, Dua Lipa, Ariana DeBose and Samuel L. Jackson. Others include BlitzOscar-winning director Steve McQueen and a Formula 1 feature film starring Brad Pitt directed by Joseph Kosinski and produced by Jerry Bruckheimer.