The services chief, named Cannes Lions’ Entertainment Person of the Year, set out the logic behind Apple TV: no licensed reruns, fewer titles, and a belief that the story is the only thing that matters.
Eddy Cue would like you to know that Apple is not finished. Accepting the title of Entertainment Person of the Year at the Cannes Lions festival this week, the company’s senior vice president of services and health framed the studio he helped build as a work in progress.“
The great thing is we’re just getting started,” he told the producer Jerry Bruckheimer on the main stage at the Palais, “so there’s a lot more to do.” The ambition, by his telling, is simple enough to fit on an awards plaque: better, more.
The festival, an advertising and creativity gathering on the Côte d’Azur, cited Cue’s stewardship of Apple Music and the Apple TV streaming service.
The 💜 of EU tech
The latest rumblings from the EU tech scene, a story from our wise ol' founder Boris, and some questionable AI art. It's free, every week, in your inbox. Sign up now!
He took the stage on Monday alongside Bruckheimer, whose “F1: The Movie” became the company’s first true theatrical hit last year.
Cue called the recognition something he could not have dreamt of as a young engineering major, which sounds rehearsed until you remember he joined Apple in 1989 to work on software, not screenplays.
Underneath the gratitude, Cue described a strategy that has stayed unusually consistent. Apple decided at the outset, ahead of the 2019 launch of what was then Apple TV+, that it would not buy a back catalogue.
Eddy Cue said most people told him a streaming service could not be started that way, and that they were probably right.
“If we were putting our name on it,” he recalled, “it was kind of weird we were going to put our name on something we didn’t help create.”
The service launched with roughly five or six original shows and nothing else. Just over six years on, the absence of licensed reruns remains its defining feature.
The governing principle, Cue said, is “the best, not the most,” which makes the stated goal of “more” a slightly delicate one to hold alongside it.
He traced the philosophy to Steve Jobs, who ran Apple and Pixar at once and once told Cue that Pixar’s reliable run of hits came down to one thing. “It begins and ends with the story,” Cue said Jobs told him.
Apple, on his account, spent two years finding the executives to run the operation before hiring the former Sony Pictures Television pair Jamie Erlicht and Zack Van Amburg in 2017.
The early pitch, he said, was almost entirely about persuasion rather than money. He recounted convincing Reese Witherspoon and Jennifer Aniston to bring “The Morning Show” to Apple by arguing that a service with no other programming would believe in it more completely than a rival with a deep slate.
The bet on prestige has since produced an Academy Award for best picture with “CODA,” a haul of Emmys, and, with the “Schmigadoon!” Broadway adaptation winning a Tony, an EGOT for the platform.
The financial picture is harder to read: Apple does not break out streaming subscriber numbers, and Cue offered none.
The “more” he gestured at is mostly films. “F1: The Movie,” starring Brad Pitt as a driver coaxed out of retirement, took $634 million at the global box office, which Cue noted is Pitt’s biggest film. A sequel has not been formally greenlit, though both men spoke as if it is coming.
“We’re going to come back and hopefully make another ‘F1’,” Bruckheimer said, the “hopefully” doing quiet work.
He also described a separate Apple project with the director Joseph Kosinski, a thriller about government secrecy around unidentified aerial phenomena. Neither has a confirmed release.
For a company whose other services bets have looked shakier of late, the entertainment line is the one Apple is happiest to talk about, and Cue talked about it with the ease of an executive collecting a prize rather than answering for a P&L.
Whether “better and more” can coexist with “the best, not the most” is a question he did not quite resolve, and was not asked to. The award, after all, was for work already done.
Get the TNW newsletter
Get the most important tech news in your inbox each week.