After two weeks of no major film releases, movie theaters are in great need of a fresh hit to break the late-winter box office drought. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like Universal/Apple’s “Argylle” will be that big hit.
Tracking for Matthew Vaughn’s spy thriller is projecting an opening weekend of $18 million, half of the $36.2 million opening that Vaughn’s 2014 film “Kingsman: The Secret Service” earned.
For most legacy studio productions, that would be a bust. But Apple is playing by different rules.
Flush with cash from non-entertainment revenue streams, the Silicon Valley tech giant has built a strategy of spending big bucks on original films from big name filmmakers — Martin Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon” and Ridley Scott’s “Napoleon,” for example — and signing deals with legacy studios to theatrically distribute the film with a full window.
'Argylle'