'Cherry', Starring Tom Holland And Directed By The Russo Brothers, Heads To Apple
Apple just scooped up Cherry, the first movie from the Russo Brothers since Avengers: Endgame, and the Russo's first non-superhero movie in a long, long time. The project reunites them with Tom Holland, who plays a war vet with PTSD who becomes a bank robber. It's based on the novel by Nico Walker, which is in part based on Walker's true story (he's a US Army veteran currently serving time in prison for bank robbery).
According to Deadline, the Apple deal for Cherry was in the "high $40 millions." It's yet another big get for Apple, who also swooped in to buy Martin Scorsese's Killers of the Flower Moon. Other big Apple deals include the Tom Hanks movie Greyhound, the Will Smith movie Emancipation, and Sofia Coppola's On The Rocks.
Cherry marks the return of the Russo Brothers, and it has them moving beyond the world of Marvel for a grittier drama. Based on the novel by Nico Walker, Cherry finds Tom Holland playing "Walker, a young Cleveland man who, after being spurned by the love of his life, joins the army before she returns to tell him she has made a mistake and they belong together. He becomes an Army medic in Iraq and sees violence and carnage no one should. Returning with a raging case of undiagnosed PTSD, he is prescribed the opiate Oxycontin. Soon, he and his young wife move from pills to heroin, and he turns to robbing banks to pay their debts and feed their habit." Ciara Bravo co-stars as the wife of Holland's character.
The film is already finished, and there's hope that it'll be an awards season contender, which means we could see it very soon. Per Deadline, "The plan is to qualify with the Academy, and premiere the film in early 2021 on Apple TV+." Jessica Goldberg and Angela Russo-Otstot penned the script, with the rest of the cast consisting of Kelli Burglund, Jack Reynor, Forrest Goodluck, Jeff Wahlberg, Michael Gandolfini, Kyle Harvey, and Thomas Lennon. His name is curiously absent from the Deadline story, but Bill Skarsgård is supposedly in the movie, too. Skarsgård recently played Holland's father in The Devil All the Time.
I'm very curious to see how this all turns out. I'm just going to come right out and say that I don't think the Russo Brothers' Marvel movies are particularly well-directed. That's not to say they're bad – I'm just saying the least interesting thing about those movies is how they're directed. So I'm interested in seeing how the Russos fair now outside the Marvel bubble. To be clear, this isn't the first non-Marvel movie they've directed – they also helmed Welcome to Collinwood and You, Me and Dupree.