By Jake Coyle, Film Writer
LOS ANGELES (AP) --Apple has canceled the premiere of one of the tech company's first original films, "The Banker" the day before it was to debut at Los Angeles' AFI Fest.
In a statement Wednesday, Apple said that last week it learned of "some concerns" surrounding "The Banker" and needs "some time to look into these matters." An Apple spokesperson declined to elaborate.
The based-on-a-true-story film stars Samuel L. Jackson and Anthony Mackie. Mackie plays Bernard Garrett who in the 1950s and '60s recruited a white man to pose as the face of his expansive real estate and banking business. In 1968, Garrett was convicted of misusing bank funds.
The film is Apple's boldest step yet into moviemaking. A theatrical release is scheduled for Dec. 6, after which it would be a part of the company's new streaming service, Apple TV Plus.
AFI said it would replace "The Banker" with a screening of Noah Baumbach's Netflix release "Marriage Story" as its closing-night film.
More than 67 million people watched Donald Trump and Kamala Harris debate. That’s way up from June
An estimated 67.1 million people watched the presidential debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, a sharp increase from the June debate that eventually led to President Joe Biden dropping out of the race.
The debate was run by ABC News but shown on 17 different networks, the Nielsen company said. The Trump-Biden debate in June was seen by 51.3 million people.
Tuesday's count was short of the record viewership for a presidential debate, when 84 million people saw Trump's and Hillary Clinton's first faceoff in 2016. The first debate between Biden and Trump in 2020 reached 73.1 million people.
With Harris widely perceived to have outperformed Trump on Tuesday night, the former president and his supporters are sharply criticizing ABC moderators David Muir and Linsey Davis. The journalists waded into on-the-fly fact checks during the debate, correcting four statements by Trump.
No other debates are currently scheduled between the two presidential candidates, although there's been some talk about it and Fox News Channel has publicly offered alternatives. CBS will host a vice presidential debate between Tim Walz and JD Vance.
Tuesday's debate stakes were high to begin with, not only because of the impending election itself but because the last presidential debate uncorked a series of events that ended several weeks later with Biden's withdrawal from the race after his performance was widely panned.
Opinions on how ABC handled the latest debate Tuesday were, in a large sense, a Rorschach test on how supporters of both sides felt about how it went. MSNBC commentator Chris Hayes sent a message on X that the ABC moderators were doing an "excellent" job — only to be answered by conservative commentator Ben Shapiro, who said,... Read More