British filmmaker Dexter Fletcher is fresh off the release of his Apple TV+ crime caper Ghosted, and during a recent interview, Fletcher highlighted what he described as the “comprises” required when developing a project for a streamer.
“You can’t make a film for streaming the same way you do for theatrical,” Fletcher told Alex Zane’s A Trip to the Movies podcast. “There are different metrics and approaches. There has to be, for the very reason that people can turn off very quickly.”
The Rocketman filmmaker continued to say that he had initially planned a long and elaborate opening sequence for Ghosted that involved Ana De Armas driving a car through a mountain in reference to a scene from the 1978 film Foul Play, starring Goldie Hawn and Chevy Chase. Fletcher said he took the scene to Apple, who said they understood what he was attempting to create but raised concerns about whether it would resonate with a streaming audience.
“I thought it was great, this three-minute opening scene, and they said you can’t do it because if it [the opening sequence] goes on and something doesn’t happen in the first 30 seconds, we know the data shows that people will just turn off,” he said. “I don’t want that, so I make the compromise.”
Earlier this week, Deadline revealed that Ghosted, which stars de Armas alongside Chris Evans, was the most-watched movie debut to date for Apple TV+. In the pic’s first two days after dropping on April 21, it pulled in 328,500 viewers per Samba TV.
The data came from a panel of 3.1M SmartTV households who tuned in for at least one minute. Samba TV’s research panel is balanced and weighted to the U.S. Census (around 112M) across age, gender, ethnicity, and household income. Its panel is nearly 100 times larger than Nielsen’s household footprint of 45,000 homes.
Written by Rhett Reese, Paul Wernick, Chris McKenna, and Erik Sommers, Ghosted follows Cole (Evans), who falls head over heels for enigmatic Sadie (de Armas) before he makes the shocking discovery that she’s a secret agent. Before they can decide on a second date, Cole and Sadie are swept away on an international adventure to save the world.