Apple Inc. AAPL recently unveiled the title and the first poster and announced the release date of its upcoming big-budget movie based on Formula One. The Brad Pitt-starrer movie has been named F1 and is scheduled to debut in the U.S. theatres on Jun 27, 2025. The global premiere of F1 has been planned for Jun 25, 2025.
Apple had onboarded actor Brad Pitt in 2022 and then director Joseph Kosinski for this film based on Formula One racing. The audience received their first sneak peek of the film at the British Grand Prix, leading some experts to speculate that the film’s budget could be around $250 million.
F1 will be streamed on Apple TV+ after its theatrical run, contributing to Apple TV+’s rich content library of award-winning movies. Per a report by Self Financial, Apple TV+ has maintained the top position on IMDb with the highest average IMDb rating of 7.01 out of 10 for its content library throughout 2021, 2022 and 2024.
For the rest of 2024, Apple has a lineup of theatrical releases — Fly Me to the Moon, The Instigators, Blitz and Wolves. Moreover, Wolves will star both George Clooney and Brad Pitt. In 2024, Apple TV+ originals like Palm Royale and Sugar also contributed to Apple TV+’s content pool.
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Increasing Content Pool
A report by Statista shows that Apple TV+ had a market share of 8% in the first quarter of 2024 in the subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) market of the United States. The leaders in this space, Amazon AMZN Prime Video, Netflix NFLX, Max and Disney’s DIS Disney+, had a market share of 22%, 21%, 14% and 11%, respectively.
In the week of May 27, 2024 to Jun 2, 2024, Neilsen reported that the top streaming programs in the United States were Bridgerton streamed on Netflix and Bluey streamed on Disney+. Moreover, among the top-watched originals were Amazon Prime’s Fallout and Outer Range and Netflix’s Bridgerton, Evil, Dancing for the Devil, Eric and Jurassic World: Chaos Theory.
To counter its competition, Apple is also expanding in the streaming arena by increasing its content base and improving the quality of its offerings. Alongside TV+ shows, Apple is launching games on Arcade and increasing its footprint globally by launching TV+ in new countries and collaborating with new partners for the Apple Pay feature.
Apple TV+ also has the advantage of being a low-priced subscription model and financial support from Apple Inc. that can enable it to capture more audience, given that Apple keeps increasing its content pool.
Moreover, Apple is getting into the sports entertainment space with the Apple Sports app, which is free for its users. With this new sports offering, 2,100 award nominations and 480 award wins for both its TV+ originals and theatrical releases, Apple is poised to be a strong contender in the entertainment space.
Conclusion
Although Apple’s entertainment offerings face immense competition from giants, including Netflix, Amazon Prime and Hulu in the streaming space and Warner Bros Discovery, Paramount and Disney in the theatrical space, Apple has the advantages of a rich content base, free sports content and strong financial support.
In the previous quarter, i.e., the first quarter of 2024, Apple set an all-time revenue record in the services segment with $23.9 billion, up 14% year over year. Apple’s services segment accounts for subscription-based services like Apple TV+, Apple Arcade, Apple Fitness+, Apple Music and Apple News+.
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