Mayday is Apple TV's answer to Top Gun Maverick – but can it possibly match it?
Ryan Reynolds is no Tom Cruise, after all
For those who really pay attention to how the world of streaming operates, there's a curiosity every time a big blockbuster gets unveiled for one of the big platforms – who actually made it? While plenty of movies are labelled as "originals" for their host services, there's often one studio behind things – Skydance. It just made another movie for Apple TV, with all its regular hallmarks: Mayday.
The film, which just got its first trailer, looks like a fairly classic action-comedy, and like some of the films that Skydance has sold to Apple previously, I'm a little dubious about whether it can possibly be much good. To its credit, the trailer makes it obvious that it has some stuff going for it, though.
The movie stars Ryan Reynolds (still on a quest to be in a genuinely great movie at any point) opposite the illustrious Kenneth Branagh. The former is a US pilot shot down in Soviet Russia in 1987, while the latter is a US-obsessed local who rescues him in the hopes of getting both of them across the border to a better life. If that sounds quite serious, and actually really similar to the last third of Top Gun: Maverick, though, the tone of the trailer quickly clarifies things.
This is an action-comedy, of course, one of Skydance's staple genres for streaming movies, and that means a lot of quips and banter between Reynolds and Branagh (doing one of the broad-brush accents he's so fond of, like in Tenet). There are also clearly going to be some huge set-pieces, including at least one at a big military parade.
To be fair, the movie looks sprightly and fun, but I can't help but feel leery when I see that Skydance logo at the start of a trailer nowadays. You only have to check out the reviews for other movies it's made for Apple (like Ghosted or Fountain of Youth) to get a sense of how boring some of its output can be.
It's not helped by the sense that it sells its most mediocre (or worse) projects for streaming, reserving the best stuff for actual cinema distribution deals. Hopefully, Mayday can prove me wrong on that front, though, when it comes to Apple TV on 4 September.
