Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Entertainment
  3. News

Steven Spielberg, Tom Hanks to bring WWII drama Masters of the Air to Apple TV+

Chris Gates
By

The team that brought you Band of Brothers and The Pacific is at it again. Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment and Playtone, the production company owned by Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman, will adapt Donald L. Miller’s nonfiction novel Masters Of The Air for Apple. The limited series will air exclusively on Apple’s upcoming streaming service, Apple TV+.

Spielberg, Hanks, and Goetzman will serve as executive producers on the series, which tells the story of the Eighth Air Force, or the Mighty Eighth, a group of pilots that changed the course of World War II. Masters of the Air will be written by Band of Brothers scribe John Orloff. Deadline reports that the series will be about eight hours long, and will cost around $200 million to produce.

Recommended Videos

Interestingly, Masters of the Air will be the first Apple TV+ series filmed at Apple’s own production studio, which is also called Masters. Apple executives Zack Van Amburg and Jamie Erlicht will oversee the studio, Variety says.

Related

Masters of the Air marks yet another instance of Apple poaching top-tier talent from its streaming service competitors. Band of Brothers and The Pacific, both of which Spielberg and Hanks produced, aired on HBO, where they earned a cumulative 43 Emmy nominations and won 14. Masters of the Air was also set to debut on the premium network, but HBO decided to pass on the project earlier this year, opening the door for Apple to swoop in and pick it up.

That’s becoming something of a trend. Just yesterday, Alfonso Cuarón, director of Netflix’s Oscar-winning film Roma, signed an exclusive deal with Apple to produce TV content for Apple TV+. That deal is said to last for five years.

In addition to Masters of the Air, Steven Spielberg is producing a revival of the sci-fi anthology series Amazing Stories for Apple TV+. The original Amazing Stories, which Spielberg created, ran on NBC for two seasons in the mid-’80s.

Apple TV+ launches on November 1, 2019, at $5 a month. Despite the staggering number of big names signed on for Apple TV+ content, analysts have expressed concerns about the service’s limited library and its overall effect on the streaming economy, which could be to drive up subscription prices across the board.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Chris Gates
Chris Gates
Contributor
Christopher Gates lives in Los Angeles, CA and writes about movies, TV, video games, and other pop culture curiosities. In…
Apple Music Sing brings karaoke singalongs to iPhones, Apple TV
Apple Music Sing.

Apple wants you to sing like everyone's listening with its new Apple Music Sing feature, a karaoke mode that works with the music streaming service's popular lyrics experience.

Available later this month on iPhone (11 and later), iPads (third-gen and later), and the 2022 model of Apple TV 4K (not earlier models, for some reason) to really max out the karaoke experience in living rooms, Apple Music Sing will be incorporated right into the Apple Music app, giving you the option to use a slider to control the volume of the vocals in Apple Music's song library so you can sing along. With the slider, you can tweak the volume to either blend your voice with the singer's or drop them out completely to go solo. Background vocals are also viewable independently from the main vocals for budding backup singers to follow more easily, and a Duet view separates multiple singers' lyrics on opposite sides of the screen.

Read more
T-Mobile adding a free year of Apple TV+ to its most expensive plans
Apple TV icon on Apple TV.

T-Mobile today announced that it's giving subscribers to its most expensive mobile plan a free subscription to Apple TV+, which normally costs $60 a year. Those who are subscribed to the Magenta Max plan — which costs $85 a month for a single line — will get Apple's streaming service for free. If you've got T-Mobile's Magenta plan, which costs $70 a month for one line, you'll get six months of Apple TV+ for free.

The perk takes effect on August 31, 2022, and it's good for the foreseeable future. (A previous version of this story stated it was just for one year, but that's legacy copy on T-Mobile's website for the old perk that's being supplanted.)

Read more
New Siri remote for Apple TV could be easier to find with an embedded AirTag
The Siri Remote in someone's hand.

Buried deep inside the code for Apple's latest mobile software -- iOS 16 -- is a reference to "SiriRemote4" and "WirelessRemoteFirmware.4," according to MacRumors, which noted the discovery made by a contributor at AppleDB, an online database of Apple software and devices. Given that all previous Siri remotes (the two original touchpad editions, plus the newest silver model) have been accounted for through other references like "SiriRemote3," the conclusion is that Apple is readying a fourth generation of this device.

Why is the the reference in a beta of iOS, when the Apple TV runs tvOS? On the one hand, it could simply be that Apple needs to keep its mobile remote functionality (which is now embedded in an iPhone's Control Center) up to date with whatever features a new remote might offer. Or, it could be because Apple is planning to add a feature to the next Apple TV remote that would require (or at least benefit from) an iPhone. And that feature could be a detailed Find My function, courtesy of Apple's AirTag technology.

Read more