“We needed to build this ourselves”: Apple’s Eddy Cue, Zack Van Amburg and Jamie Erlicht talk ‘F1’ and Emmys success, upcoming slate, and launching a platform

After F1: The Movie became the highest-grossing original release of 2025, and fresh off 22 Emmy wins for The Studio, Severance and Slow Horses, Apple SVP, services, Eddy Cue and co-heads of worldwide video Zack Van Amburg and Jamie Erlicht sat down with Screen International’s Jeremy Kay to discuss the company’s streaming journey, film strategy and future ambitions

Six years after the debut of Apple’s streaming platform, the executives behind the newly renamed Apple TV and its growing pipeline of original film and television – SVP, services, Eddy Cue and joint chief content officers and heads of worldwide video Zack Van Amburg and Jamie Erlicht – are enjoying their biggest year.

Joseph Kosinski’s F1, produced by Jerry Bruckheimer and starring Brad Pitt, is poised to cross $630m at the global box office and ranks as 2025’s biggest original release, Pitt’s biggest hit and the highest-grossing sports film of all time. On the TV side, The Studio, Severance and Slow Horses combined for a company-­record 22 Primetime Emmy wins.

A lot has happened since 2017, when Cue hired former Sony Pictures Television presidents Van Amburg and Erlicht to build a film and TV slate. Apple TV+ (as it was then called) went live on November 1, 2019, with an offering that included inaugural series The Morning Show – the first of many statement buys that saw Apple outbid multiple suitors for the Jennifer Aniston-Reese Wither­spoon news network drama. The fourth season is now airing and the show sits alongside other Primetime Emmy success stories like the aforementioned 2025 winners and the hugely popular Ted Lasso and For All Mankind – both of which have new seasons in the works.

In 2022, the streamer became the first to win a coveted best picture Oscar after Apple Original Films acquired 2021 Sundance hit Coda. It followed that up by collaborating with titans of cinema such as Martin Scorsese on multiple Oscar-­nominated Killers Of The Flower Moon and Ridley Scott on Napoleon. However, Apple does not have its own distribution and marketing apparatus, choosing instead to partner on theatrical releases with the Hollywood majors.

Speculation has been rife in the industry over Apple’s feature strategy, and the company has kept Holly­wood guessing. There was the late pivot in 2024 from a wide release on the George Clooney-Brad Pitt crime thriller Wolfs, after soft box office for Argylle and Fly Me To The Moon. Then came this year’s spectacular box office for F1 with its 60-day exclusive North American theatrical window (Apple partnered with Warner Bros on the release).

Paul Greengrass’s Toronto selection The Lost Bus, starring Matthew McConaughey and America Ferrera, and Spike Lee’s Cannes entry Highest 2 Lowest, led by Denzel Washington, both had limited releases prior to debuting on the platform.

Cue, Van Amburg and Erlicht are playing their cards close to their chests – Cue declined to be drawn in this interview on whether Apple was pursuing US broadcast rights for Formula 1 just days before the company announced a $750m five-year deal starting in 2026. However, they are very happy to talk about making film and television with top talent and corporate partners around the world.

Among a burgeoning roster of titles, Apple is reteaming with Kosinski and Bruckheimer on a UFO conspiracy thriller, and is in talks to reunite with Scorsese on the supernatural horror What Happens At Night, set to star Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence, in a partnership with Studio­canal. Screen International can also reveal new projects with Mark Wahlberg and Bruckheimer. 

The executive leadership team that has been in place for more than seven years includes Matt Cherniss, head of programming; Matt Dentler, head of features; Jay Hunt, creative director, Europe; and Morgan Wandell, head of international; along with Philip Matthys, head of business affairs; and Rita Cooper Lee, head of communications and awards.

Screen: This has been a massive year. How did you get to this point?

Eddy Cue: Hard work.

Zack Van Amburg: It started with a tremendous amount of trust from Eddy Cue, who believed that a group of people would be able to come together, and that quality entertainment was still the thing that was going to be valued in the world – kind of a crazy thesis. It’s been a thrill ride. We joke that we worked almost six years to become an overnight success story.

Apple TV is certainly having a moment. We’ve had a lot of them, whether it’s highlights like winning best picture for Coda, or the run that Ted Lasso went on a few years ago when it won Emmy awards and was recognised as the number-one streaming show in the world. [Nielsen reported Ted Lasso was the most-watched streaming original in 2023 based on minutes viewed, before Severance became Apple TV’s most-watched original series worldwide in February 2025.] We have gone from strength to strength and our strategy was [to] work with the best people – people who knew what they wanted to say and how they wanted to say it.

Jamie Erlicht: We’re building an all-original service; we’re not building on the back of pre-existing IP or library. Eddy promised us time and patience and that’s exactly what he’s delivered. You’re now seeing the culmination of that time and patience and incredible partnerships with the best storytellers in the business.

Cue: It took longer than I thought and it was harder than I thought. I didn’t expect to be out of commission thanks to Covid for a while with no catalogue. I didn’t expect the strikes to take us down for nine months. I’ve learned over time nothing great is easy – it’s through a lot of hard work. Now we’re at a point where we haven’t had any issues and stoppages and we’ve got new content all the time: shows that are coming back, new shows, new movies. It’s an exciting time for us.

How busy is the pipeline?

Van Amburg: We have a new original nearly every single week [in 2026]. I can now see The Family Plan 2 coming up, the next season of Ted Lasso, For All Mankind, The Morning Show and Hijack is coming back. That’s mixed with all these new originals – [Breaking Bad creator] Vince Gilligan is coming out with Pluribus, and Emma Thompson is in Down Cemetery Road. Slow Horses is on right now and continuing. Our audience has spoken loudly about what they love, and being able to deliver that along with some new things is a fun place to be.

What was the original proposition to Apple leadership for the film and TV business?

Cue: It started a while back by watching Steve [Jobs] as the CEO of Pixar and the CEO of Apple. I got to learn a bit about the film business through the interactions with Pixar, and then we [had] iTunes and started meeting all the studios and started selling their movies and TV shows.

At the time, I didn’t have any aspiration or thought that we would be in this business in any way, shape or form. But as time went on, I felt there was an opening. It seemed like everyone was trying to move towards a ton of content. My experiences always said that if you do a lot, it’s nearly impossible to be great or to do great things. At Apple, we do a few things that hopefully we think are great, and it takes everything we’ve got. In order to do that, you have to find great people, and I was lucky to find Zack and Jamie. I knew they were the ones because they had the experience and knowledge and background, and they had taste.

Everybody said, “You can’t do this because you can’t start a service without a library,” and they’re probably right. It takes a long time. You have to commit to it for a long time to do that. I just felt like we needed to build this ourselves.

When you started out, people questioned whether it was a vanity play by one of the world’s richest companies, or a value-add for Apple device owners. Was it?

Cue: It was never that – we never started from that viewpoint. I thought if we did a great job at building a real business, would it be great for the Apple brand? Of course. But it was never about that. We make our service available on Android, on games consoles, on TVs, on cable boxes – everywhere.

Besides Zack and Jamie, the other two people that believed in us were Reese Witherspoon and Jennifer Aniston. They’re at the top of their game, they’re exactly what we’re talking about. And at the time when we were trying to get the show [The Morning Show], other people wanted them and they took a big risk on the three of us and Apple when we didn’t have anything. We didn’t even know what the service was going to be, what it was going to cost. We just had a vision of what we were trying to create.

How do you define an Apple film or show?

Van Amburg: It’s like saying, Is it possible to define creativity? Other than maybe some of our personal tastes, which we try not to bring into how we develop and how we programme, we try to understand what the tastes of the audience are going to be. Creating a brand and an identity in the world of entertainment is fairly elusive. I think places like Disney have done it extraordinarily well.

The interesting thing for us at Apple is we want movies and shows to come out differently – but I want them to resonate with an audience a little more deeply and thoughtfully. A core tenet of everything Apple does is the notion that humanity needs to be at the centre of it, and that’s everything from app design to hardware engineering to everything in between. We try to think a little more deeply about that.

Our shows and our movies tend to be about the emotional experience, the stakes involved, even when we’re doing a comedy. Take a look at Shrinking, The Studio, Ted Lasso – these iconic characters have emerged out of a genre that’s just designed to make you laugh. I think we’ve found the right alchemy. When we take a look at how movies and series get rated, we’re consistently now, five years in the running, the number-one service across the board across our entire slate.

What is your strategy for local-language content?

Erlicht: We’re looking for great stories from around the world. There are incredible storytellers in all the major territories. We’re not focused necessarily on local-­language. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t. We’re looking for great stories. Sometimes those come from more localised stories, international stories and storytellers, but we always want to believe that it can succeed globally.

We’ve had tremendous success with stories like Slow Horses, and Down Cemetery Road from the same author [Mick Herron] is going to be our next big one coming from the UK. Carême is French language and had a big audience. Drops Of God is in Japanese, French and English and feels like a global show.

What’s the film strategy? After the success of F1, are you going to double down and become a regular supplier of big theatrical features to the market?

Van Amburg: Make great movies. That sounds trite but it’s the truth. We’re approaching 40 films that we’ve made. Apple Original Films is the supplier for Apple TV – it’s our own studio. We’ve been committed to film since the outset and I don’t think there’s one size that fits all.

With F1, we bet on the right team. Joe Kosinski is one of the most innovative directors out there. And then you pair that with Jerry Bruckheimer, who is one of the absolute best, if not the best, film producers. And then suddenly, Lewis Hamilton [a producer on F1] is a part of it to bring authenticity. And then Brad Pitt comes on, and then Damson [Idris]. At the core of it there’s a human, emotional story – there are so many deep themes across that film that make it more than just a race-car movie. It led to it becoming a number-one film.

Is that a validating moment of a strategy that began with, “Hey, let’s do some limited release things, let’s make sure that we qualify, and let’s make sure that some audiences see it,” and then we win best picture for Coda? Yes. It’s all part of a continuum, and we’re very intentional. Are we going to double down? If we have amazing movies in front of us, it will give us the confidence to know where this movie goes. For every movie that we haven’t released theatrically and have [sent] straight to the platform, we’ve had some major hits.

Erlicht: You’re talking to three people who grew up going to the theatre, who love the theatrical experience. We love our contribution to the current theatrical experience. We’re not going to have any one strategy that we’re going to do all for theatrical, or none for theatrical, we’re going to evaluate it on a case-by-case basis. We just love the movie business in all its incarnations. F1 is [still] in 47 markets and did a couple of hundred thousand last week [from approximately 150 international cinemas]. And we don’t believe the theatrical experience cannibalises off what we’re going to do. You’re going to see a huge response on December 12 when F1 comes to our platform.

How popular were films that went straight to the service: The Gorge, Happy Valley, Echo Valley, Spirited? Can you provide any numbers?

Van Amburg: Millions of people watched them.

Do you have a mandate to release a set number of films theatrically each year?

Van Amburg: We don’t have the pressure of that.

It sounds from what you’ve said that you won’t establish a minimum exclusive theatrical window for your films and will decide each one on a case-by-case basis.

Cue: Why set rules? We need to be more flexible. The world is a big place. Fans and customers have a lot of things they can do. There’s a lot of competition in the world, and saying everything has to be a certain way is difficult. I don’t think that works anymore. If everything has to be a certain number, generally things go to the lowest common denominator. So then it becomes, “Okay, well, every movie can only be 30 days in theatres and then it’s off.”

We had a lot of conversations when we started about how to release our TV shows. Should we release them all at once, so audiences can binge? Should we release once a week? Twice? We thought, “Why do we have to decide that? Why does every show have to be the same?”

There are shows like Severance where you want people to have that waiting and the whole conversation that happens when we’re all on the same page. If we put them all out, then you don’t have any of those conversations because I’m done, you’re on episode five, and Jamie’s on episode two. You can’t have that. And then you have a show, The Reluctant Traveler [Apple’s travel series with Eugene Levy], which you can watch in pretty much any order. You want to be where customers want you to be.

Van Amburg:  We’ve brought back appointment television. We now have a creative team thinking about what the weekly journey is going to be for an audience versus just the totality of it. That brings a different level of discipline back to storytelling.

So far you’ve partnered with the Hollywood majors on theatrical distribution. Are you planning to set up your own infrastructure?

Cue: I don’t know the answer to that. We’re not in the process of doing that today. We’ve had some great partnerships that have worked well for us. Maybe someday that’s the right thing to do, just not today.

Does the record annual haul of Emmy wins frame how you look at the TV business going forward?

Erlicht: The Emmy wins and the Academy Award – all of the accolades that we’ve gotten are phenomenal. But they don’t define why we do it, and we don’t aim for that award as our ultimate goal. They happen to coincide very well with the great, high-quality product that we’re putting out there. We did not set out [to accomplish that] on Ted Lasso, on Coda, on Severance, on The Studio. It’s refreshing when the creative community give us that recognition. It’s just not the fundamental reason we do it.

Are Apple film acquisitions executives on the ground at the major festivals and markets?

Van Amburg: Yes. We have a great team.

Will you attend the American Film Market in Los Angeles?

Van Amburg:  We’ll have somebody look at it. We have a team that’s dedicated to discovery. The festivals are a great way to do that. Some of our film team come out of either running festivals or being part of selling or buying at the festivals. So that’s always going to be in our DNA.

Pay-1 deals are tough to come by for independent theatrical buyers. Is Apple a pay-1 partner to anyone, and if not, do you plan to be?

Cue: One of the things I’ve learned in life is never say no to something that may happen in the future, so I don’t know. I can tell you at least in the timeframe that we’re thinking about right now, we’re not looking at licensing any content or adding anything to our service. We’re now at the point where we’ve got a lot of content, and we have a lot more coming up.

Why did you remove the ‘+’ from Apple TV+?

Cue: We have services like iCloud and Apple News that have a plus. But the reason they do is because they have a free service that’s permanent, so you can get Apple News for free, and then there’s a plus version that offers more content, like The Wall Street Journal and other things. Just to be consistent, we decided to put the plus on [the platform]. But lots of us called it Apple TV, and we thought with all the content and everything that we’ve got, let’s just call it what we’ve always called it.

Can you provide guidance on the number of global Apple TV subscribers? In March it was reported by third parties that there are 40-45 million.

Cue: We haven’t announced our subscribers. I can tell you we’re growing faster, we have more viewers and they have more viewing hours in this past year than we’ve had at any time. It’s no surprise. It goes back to the amount of content that we’re putting out versus where we started. We knew it would take some time to get to where we are. We’re also very aggressive with our pricing. For $12.99 [in the US], look at the amount of content you get from us, and no ads.

Are there plans for a tier with ads?

Cue: Nothing at this time. Again, I don’t want to say no forever, but there are no plans. If we can stay aggressive with our pricing, it’s better for consumers not to get interrupted with ads.

Do you have budget constraints or is the goal more skewed towards attracting the biggest talent at any cost?

Cue: Everybody has budget constraints. I remember reading things about whether we had made major budget cuts – we have never cut our Apple TV spending and from that standpoint, we’ve actually grown it. But we are always looking at how much we’re spending, where we’re spending, how we’re spending, and we’ve made adjustments. Everyone needs to be doing that, so I don’t think it’s unique to us.

Will you buy A24, or Warner Bros, or even Disney?

Cue: Same answer as before, but you’ve got to look at Apple from a historical point of view. We don’t do a lot of major acquisitions. We do very small acquisitions in general, not related to Apple TV, so I don’t see that happening because we like what we’re doing. We’re building and we’ll continue building from that.

Is there an update on the Joseph Kosinski/Jerry Bruckheimer UFO movie?

Erlicht: We were just with Jerry and Joe, and we talked about that. It’s still very early days, but it’s a huge priority for them, and a huge priority for us.

Van Amburg: Yes, the script will come next. They’ve been doing a lot of research. They have a lot of interesting stories that they’re validating with that same level of precision and authenticity that Joe and Jerry bring to everything. They’re validating some of the most interesting stories that have never been told, with footage to back it up. That is going to be a thrill ride.

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