Life has found a way to let natural historian extraordinaire Sir David Attenborough and The Mandalorian creator Jon Favreau team up for a new dinosaur-filled show on Apple TV Plus.
Apple just released the first batch of trailers for Prehistoric Planet, a five-part docu-series coming to the company's Cupertino streaming platform for five consecutive nights starting May 23.
Narrated by Attenborough and a co-production between Favreau, Mike Gunton and Planet Earth, BBC Studio's natural history unit, the Apple TV Plus exclusive promises to "transport viewers more than 66 million years into the past to discover our world and the dinosaurs that inhabited it. ."
If you're a fan of Jurassic Park or Walking With Dinosaurs, it sounds like you're in for an audiovisual treat. With Hans Zimmer handling the score and special effects for MPC (the wizards behind adaptations of The Jungle Book and The Lion King), the human talent involved is almost as gigantic as the lizards weighing down the show's stars.
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Those who value historical accuracy will find that Prehistoric Planet does as much as previous dinosaur series to bring its stars to life as if they've walked the Earth. The show promises to show a more nurturing side of the fearsome Tyrannosaurus Rex than has ever been portrayed before on television or in the movies, while anatomical precision, such as feathered youngsters and air-sac dependent sauropods, is visible in the trailers.
It's also interesting that Apple is choosing a different launch strategy for Prehistoric Planet: its five-night cadence suggests that Apple is trying to create a TV event of the same genre that was once seen on traditional terrestrial broadcast. It shows that the company has a lot of faith in the hardware, looking to create a sustained buzz that will have a halo effect on the rest of the streaming services' output.
Prehistoric Planet is another feather in the roof for Apple TV Plus for 2022. It looks like an excellent year ahead for subscribers, who are looking forward to Martin Scorsese's Killer's Of The Flower Moon and Taron Egerton's Tetris, as well as Henry Cavill's thriller. Matthew Vaughn's spy Argylle and Ridley Scott's Napoleon, with Joker's Joaquin Phoenix.