David Farnor | On 09, Mar 2022

Apple TV+ has unveiled its slate of original films for 2022, giving us a glimpse of projects from Alfonso Cuaron, Antoine Fuqua, Oprah Winfrey, Octavia Spencer, Will Smith, Martin Scorsese and more.

On the way this year will be Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio’s Killers of the Flower Moon. Starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro, Lily Gladstone, Jesse Plemons and John Lithgow, the film follows the serial murder of members of the oil-wealthy Osage Nation, a string of brutal crimes that came to be known as the Reign of Terror.

We’ve also got our first look (above) at Henry Cavill and Duo Lipa in Matthew Vaughn’s spy thriller Argylle, which also stars Bryce Dallas Howard, Sam Rockwell, Bryan Cranston, Catherine O’Hara and Ariana DeBose with John Cena and Samuel L Jackson.

Cha Cha Real Smooth, winner of the 2022 Sundance Film Festival US Dramatic Audience Award, will premiere globally on Apple TV+ on 17th June. Writer-director Cooper Raiff also stars as a recent college graduate stuck back at home with his family and working as a party-starter for bar and bat mitzvahs who strikes up a unique friendship with a young mom, played by Dakota Johnson, and her teenage daughter.

Also set to debut this summer are a documentary executive produced by Oprah Winfrey and directed by Reginald Hudlin about the career and life of the late Sidney Poitier, and Luck, a new feature from Skydance Animation about the unluckiest girl in the world, starring Jane Fonda, Whoopi Goldberg, Eva Noblezada and Simon Pegg, premiering 5th August.

This autumn will see the debut of Black & Blues: The Colorful Ballad of Louis Armstrong, a definitive look at the master musician’s life and legacy as a founding father of jazz, produced under Apple’s first-look agreement with Imagine Documentaries, and Raymond & Ray, which follows half-brothers Raymond and Ray (played by Ewan McGregor and Ethan Hawke) who have lived in the shadow of a terrible father.

They’ll be joined by Peter Farrelly’s The Greatest Beer Run Ever, a new dramedy starring Zac Efron and Russell Crowe based on the true story of John “Chickie” Donohue, who in 1968 left New York to track down and share a few beers with his childhood buddies now in the Army – fighting in Vietnam. The documentary feature The Sound of 007 will also make its global debut this autumn, to mark the 60th anniversary of the James Bond film series.

Spirited, a modern musical rendition of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, will arrive in time for Christmas, starring Ryan Reynolds, Will Ferrell and Octavia Spencer. Before the end of 2022, Antoine Fuqua and Will Smith’s highly anticipated new film Emancipation, which tells the triumphant story of a man who escapes from slavery, will debut on Apple TV+.

Also coming soon are Sharper, a New York City-set suspense-thriller from writers Brian Gatewood and Alessandro Tanaka starring Julianne Moore, Sebastian Stan, Justice Smith, Briana Middleton and John Lithgow, and Tetris, starring Taron Egerton, which follows the journey of one of the most iconic computer games in the world.

In the production pipeline for releases further into the future are Ridley Scott’s Napoleon, starring Joaquin Phoenix as the French military leader and emperor alongside Vanessa Kirby as Josephine; a pair of complementary documentaries entitled Number One on the Call Sheet, celebrating Black leading women and men in Hollywood; Ghosted, a high-concept romantic action adventure film starring Chris Evans and Ana de Armas; Skydance Animation’s Spellbound, which follows a young girl who sets out to break the spell that has divided her kingdom in two; and The Beanie Bubble, inspired by the story behind one of the biggest speculative crazes that blazed through American culture in the ‘90s and starring Elizabeth Banks, Zach Galifianakis, Sarah Snook and Geraldine Viswanathan.

Apple is also in development on a number of other projects, including Adam McKay’s Bad Blood, about the rise and fall of Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes, with Jennifer Lawrence producing and starring as Holmes; the genre-bending film Bride, produced by and starring Scarlett Johansson; Snow Blind with Jake Gyllenhaal attached to star; a new Sue Mengers biopic starring Academy Award winner Jennifer Lawrence; Dolly, a new feature film written by Academy Award nominee Vanessa Taylor and Drew Pearce with Academy Award nominee Florence Pugh attached to star; an adaption of Judy Heumann’s bestselling memoir Being Heumann from Siân Heder; an Audrey Hepburn biopic; and a thriller with George Clooney and Brad Pitt about two lone fixers who are assigned to the same job, written and directed by Jon Watts.

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