Having paid upwards of $150 million to secure the distribution rights to the first installment in what’s being planned as a trilogy, Apple clearly have huge faith in Matthew Vaughn’s Argylle.
Which is fair, when the filmmaker’s stints at the helm of X-Men: First Class and the Kingsman franchise have proven that he’s no slouch when it comes to helming efficient big budget blockbusters, wrangling a star-studded cast and delivering a winning blend of heart, humor and spectacle.
Even by Vaughn’s standards, though, Argylle is absolutely stacked with talent. Bryce Dallas Howard plays an amnesiac spy tricked into believing she’s a writer, who soon discovers the real reasons she knows so much about the machinations of international espionage, which inevitably stirs up a hornet’s nest of bad guys looking to take her out before she remembers everything.
Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter, Vaughn confirmed that he’s been in discussions with the streaming service over Argylle potentially scoring some sort of theatrical release.
“In the world we’re living in right now where The King’s Man could’ve easily ended up on a platform and not waited for three years, I think the answer is… Apple believes in cinema and I believe in cinema. So we’re discussing how to give it the right cinematic release, not necessarily the normal cinematic release. It’d be a cinematic release that is right for Argylle, and Argylle is quite specific and different. So weirdly, it lends itself to a whole new way of being released.”
A globetrotting spy actioner that co-stars Henry Cavill, John Cena, Sam Rockwell, Catherine O’Hara, Bryan Cranston, Samuel L. Jackson and more sounds like the type of project that could put a serious dent in the box office, so we’ll be interested to see what sort of arrangement Vaughn and Apple strike over Argylle.