Apple’s biggest movie, ‘The Gorge,’ cost Skydance just $176.6 million

“The Gorge,” starring Miles Teller, Anya Taylor-Joy, and Sigourney Weaver, premiered on February 14, 2025 on Apple TV+.
In Apple’s film “The Gorge,” two highly-trained operatives (Miles Teller and Anya Taylor-Joy) are appointed to posts in guard towers on opposite sides of a vast and highly classified gorge, protecting the world from an undisclosed, mysterious evil that lurks within. They bond from a distance while trying to stay vigilant in defending against an unseen enemy. When the cataclysmic threat to humanity is revealed to them, they must work together in a test of both their physical and mental strength to keep the secret in the gorge before it’s too late.

Caroline Reid for Forbes:
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It takes much more than the wave of a magic wand to make a movie which soars to the top of a streaming platform’s charts. Pulling it off in the face of lukewarm reviews is even tougher. Doing all that for a net cost of just $176.6 million sounds like the stuff of fantasy. Not for Skydance… the multimedia conglomerate founded by billionaire Oracle scion David Ellison.
Unsurprisingly, critics didn’t warm to the movie’s cliched plot and gave it a 62% score on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes… In contrast, audiences lapped it up. They rated it 75% on Rotten Tomatoes but that was just the start. As Deadline reported, The Gorge became Apple TV+’s biggest launch for a movie ever, surpassing Wolfs starring George Clooney and Brad Pitt.
Although Apple didn’t disclose specific numbers it confirmed that during the weekend that the movie was released it drove double-digit growth globally for its platform and boosted new viewers by more than 80% compared to the same period the previous week. In Apple’s battle with bigger and better established streamers, that kind of increase in business was invaluable…
The Skydance subsidiary behind The Gorge is called Hadrian Productions UK and its latest earnings releases reveal that by August 31, 2024, a total of $213.6 million (£166.2 million) had been spent on the movie which was in line with the budget… The movie cast a powerful spell on the U.K. economy as a total of $12.6 million (£10.1 million) was spent on the staff who peaked at a monthly average of 165 employees.
That doesn’t include freelancers, contractors and temporary workers as they aren’t listed as employees on the books of U.K. companies but often represent the majority of the crew on a film shoot. In return for generating this blockbuster economic impact, Skydance banked a total tax credit of $37 million (£28.9 million) bringing its net spending down to just $176.6 million.

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MacDailyNews Take: As we wrote back in February, “Two thumbs up. The Gorge is a fun popcorn flick! It’d be perfect for a drive-in.”

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