‘I no longer trusted Apple’: Leading Marvel and Star Wars director says ‘thanks, but no thanks’ to Hollywood’s direct-to-streaming antics

Jon Watts is one of the most in-demand directors in all of Hollywood right now, having directed the first Spider-Man trilogy for the MCU on top of the upcoming Star Wars television series Skeleton Crew, not to mention the hugely successful Wolfs on Apple TV Plus. But even a prolific filmmaker like Watts is having trouble dealing with the industry’s antics, which mostly involve a burning wish to run the entire business to the ground.

There has been a lot of discourse surrounding the business model introduced by Netflix a decade ago and now widely accepted as the norm throughout the entertainment industry. Legendary filmmakers like Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg have made no secret their disdain for what they consider the antithesis of the movie-going experience. The Coen Brothers once rightly observed that “most streaming services just want to buy by the yard.” And you know you’ve messed up when a staunch anti-gatekeeper like Christopher Nolan denounces your entire model and takes his business elsewhere.

For the most part, however, it seems we’ve all but survived the dark years when no one would go to the movies (in no small part prompted by the COVID-19 pandemic) and box office numbers were becoming increasingly more irrelevant. Cinema has made a miraculous recovery over the past couple of years, but even that isn’t going to stop big corporate tycoons from breaking trust and rolling the dice for their benefit.

Take Wolfs, for instance, which, by most accounts, is a fairly decent comedy thriller starring two of the biggest stars in Hollywood (Prad Bitt and George Clooney) and created by a man who knows what he’s about when he’s behind a camera. Apple had apparently promised Jon Watts a full theatrical release for Wolfs, a deal they went back on a little while before the movie’s release. Watts had been contracted to write a sequel, but now he’s scrapping those plans and cutting ties with Apple because of the studio’s broken promise.

“I showed Apple my final cut of Wolfs early this year,” he told Deadline in a recent interview. “They were extremely enthusiastic about it and immediately commissioned me to start writing a sequel. But their last-minute shift from a promised wide theatrical release to a streaming release was a total surprise and made without any explanation or discussion. I wasn’t even told about it until less than a week before they announced it to the world.”

Imagine that — professionals have standards, and you can’t just renege on a deal without facing the consequences. But if you think that makes Big Corp the villain yet again, just wait until you hear what Apple did next.

“I was completely shocked and asked them to please not include the news that I was writing a sequel,” Watts said. “They ignored my request and announced it in their press release anyway, seemingly to create a positive spin to their streaming pivot. And so I quietly returned the money they gave me for the sequel. I didn’t want to talk about it because I was proud of the film and didn’t want to generate any unnecessary negative press. I loved working with Brad and George (and Amy and Austin and Poorna and Zlatko) and would happily do it again. But the truth is that Apple didn’t cancel the Wolfs sequel. I did, because I no longer trusted them as a creative partner.”

If that’s how streaming moguls like Apple treat industry veterans, imagine the kind of stunts they pull on fresh talent.