Apple, the world's most valuable company, couldn't find money for a Sofia Coppola show

Apple, the world’s most valuable company, has come upon hard times. Worth a measly $2.7 trillion, Apple is on the cusp of releasing an affordable pair of AR goggles that will revolutionize the art of seeing phantom lines after staring at a screen for too long. However, whether people will buy into their vision of wearing $3,500 future goggles for hours at a time is unknown. The goggles may be sold out, but it’s clearly a make-or-break moment for the company, especially after killing Sofia Coppola’s five-part adaptation of Edith Wharton’s The Custom Of The Country starring Florence Pugh. Per The New Yorker, Coppola says that the company charging $3,500 for iPhone-themed ski goggles “pulled our funding,” describing it, rightfully, as “a real drag.” Like the rest of us, Coppola “thought they had unlimited resources.”

According to Variety, Coppola described the project as akin to “five Marie Antoinettes,” which cost $45 million. We sincerely doubt her Edith Wharton adaptation would have cost $225 million, but either way, the promise of five Marie Antoinettes is worth the price. Previously, Coppola made On The Rocks, starring Bill Murray and Rashida Jones, for Apple, which announced Custom in 2020. The project fell out of public view after that, and in October, Coppola told the New York Times that Apple wasn’t into the main character, Undine Spragg, who is both Coppola’s favorite literary anti-heroine and a character the tech behemoth found “unlikable.”

“They didn’t get the character of Undine,” Coppola said of the company that produces The Morning Show and greenlit a second season of the Wharton adaptation, The Buccaneers. “She’s so ‘unlikable.’ But so is Tony Soprano!”

Maybe The Buccaneers is uniquely suited for watching on a screen that’s an inch away from the eyes.