Apple is in an enviable place in the streaming wars. Neither pursuing Warner Bros. nor being pursued by Disney, Apple is the first streamer to win the Academy Award for Best Picture and nabbed another nomination for F1. It might even have a sequel on the way. (“Stay tuned,” said Formula 1 CEO Stefano Domenicali.) The streamer is rumored to have “significantly more” than 45 million subscribers, likely through one of Apple’s many “get six months free” deals that come with movie tickets and cell phone plans. Its plan for bringing in more subscribers: star power and a smorgasbord of offerings. It was all on display in Apple’s packed 2026 Press Day in Santa Monica.
A-List stars comprise the link that chains the streaming service together. Throughout the day, starpower became a recurring theme. Apple announced more than a dozen new or returning shows during its presentation, with big names attached to each. They got Anya Taylor-Joy, Timothy Olyphant, and Annette Bening for the action series Lucky, which drops this July. The latest from David E. Kelly, Margo’s Got Money Troubles, premiering this April, boasts Elle Fanning, Michelle Pfeiffer, Nick Offerman, and Nicole Kidman. It even revived The Last Thing He Told Me, returning in February, starring Jennifer Garner, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Angourie Rice, Judy Greer, and Rita Wilson, three years after its season-one finale. But in both budget and character height, Monarch: Legacy Of Monsters is perhaps the biggest. It’s the only show with both Russells—Kurt and Wyatt—plus Godzilla and King Kong.
The day mostly focused on TV, with each new show given a panel to discuss the ideas behind the project. Movies, however, were regulated to interstitials. Stars would appear, perform a little pre-written banter, introduce a trailer, and exit stage left. Debuting in October, Matchbox is the centerpiece of the streamer’s movie calendar. The automotive action flick has to race to distinguish itself from star John Cena’s other car-based action series, Fast & Furious. Still, Matchbox has Lego Movie‘s “grown-ups rediscovering spirit of play” story in the driver’s seat. The movie follows a group of recovering Matchbox car fanatics who were kidnapped because one of them is a covert CIA agent (Cena) accused of stealing a nuclear warhead. Just like the toys! It’s also not without its stars; Cena is joined by Jessica Biel and Sam Richardson.
Matchbox‘s lighter tone is present in the streamer’s movie comedies. Arriving in July, The Dink is a sports comedy about a washed-up tennis prodigy slumming it on the pickleball court. Directed by Barb & Star’s Josh Greenbaum and written by Hollywood Handbook’s Sean Clements, the movie stars Jake Johnson, Mary Steenburgen, Ed Harris, and Ben Stiller, who also produces. The first look at the Jonah Hill-directed dramedy Outcome, starring Keanu Reeves, Cameron Diaz, and Matt Bomer, feels like Hill (who looks wild in this thing) exorcising the demons of his recent public controversies. It follows the world’s hottest movie star, Reef Hawk (Reeves), as he deals with the fallout from his darkest, most cancellable actions hitting the internet. There’s also the action-comedy Mayday waiting in the wings, where it has been since it wrapped production in 2024. A two-hander starring Ryan Reynolds and Kenneth Branagh, Mayday was directed by Dungeons & Dragons duo Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley. After two years on the shelf, it is finally coming out this September. Apparently, it’s a Top Gun-meets-Misery riff set in Soviet Russia.
Apple had a much more robust slate of TV offerings. Two new series from Apple present variations on a theme, featuring two shows about internet-based sex work. May will see the debut of Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed, a 10-episode thriller starring Tatiana Maslany and Jake Johnson, in which a camboy-obsessed housewife falls down a conspiracy theory rabbit hole. A more uplifting version of that comes this April in the form of Margo’s Got Money Troubles, based on the bestseller of the same name. The dysfunctional family comedy sees Fanning as Margo, a pregnant college dropout, who hops on OnlyFans to make ends meet.
The most anticipated new series, though, is Cape Fear, a reimagining of the 1991 Martin Scorsese remake of the 1962 movie. Arriving in June, Cape Fear digs deeper into the lives of Anna (Amy Adams) and Tom (Patrick Wilson) Bowden, the attorneys who put away the recently released tattooed psychopath Max Cady (Javier Bardem). Cape Fear has its work cut out for it, stretching a two-hour movie into a 10-episode thriller. Amy Adams said the show has a “fever dream energy,” but the number of episodes allowed them to go “so much deeper in their backstories, to bring in more of the family members into Max’s gaze, to examine relationships and consequences. That’s one of the things that I was really attracted to, examining the consequences of the things we keep secret.” May we all smoke cigars and laugh maniacally at it later this year.
There’s also some symmetry between Cape Fear and Widow’s Bay, another water-based thriller coming in April. Created by Katie Dippold and directed by Atlanta‘s Hiro Murai, Widow’s Bay sees Matthew Rhys, essentially, play the mayor from Jaws, attempting to bring tourists to a dangerous East Coast beach he insists is safe. Though unlike Cape Fear, Widow’s Bay is a 30-minute horror-comedy with genuine scares, according to Rhys. “I’ve never read anything like it, and I am a child of the ’80s,” said Rhys, “and grew up with things like Wicker Man and Jaws. This was everything I thought I would never get to do.” Stephen Root plays the town’s grizzled old man who rants about the dangers of Widow’s Bay, which seems like all anyone needs to know about the show.
It wasn’t only new shows. Apple was happy to welcome back hits like Your Friends & Neighbors and Shrinking. The latter, which just received a season four renewal, gave Harrison Ford a chance to work with Michael J. Fox for the first time. “It was a bit daunting when I thought about it,” Ford said of working with Fox. “Because I am representing a character that has Parkinson’s, and Michael, of course, has the real thing, and I’ve always felt a real sense of responsibility about getting that part of my story right. It was an extraordinary experience to work with him. He’s such a powerful presence with grace, courage, and indomitability. Some of that, I hope, will help color my portrayal of a character with Parkinson’s.”
Over the packed day, it was clear that Apple still hopes to build out its streaming service with a library of originals rather than buying up IP. It seems content to wait a few years for another season of Pluribus rather than worrying about a superhero cinematic universe to hang its hat on. “It takes a long time to come up with these episodes,” said Pluribus creator Vince Gilligan. “We are deeper into the process at this moment than I would like, considering how few episodes we have figured out. But it takes some time, just as it did the first season.”