Apple TV Plus Buys ‘Cha Cha Real Smooth’ At Sundance For $15 Million

In what’s becoming an annual rite, Apple TV Plus opened its prodigious pocketbook to scoop up another charming Sundance Film Festival hit, in this case, laying out $15 million for Cooper Raiff’s Cha Cha Real Smooth.

Raiff wrote, produced, directed and stars in the film, about an aimless 23-year-old college grad named Andrew trying to figure out his life and career. He’s living at the New Jersey home of his mother (Leslie Mann) and stepfather (Brad Garrett), and working at Meat Sticks, a soul-killing mall food-court outpost with a truly great name.

By happenstance, Andrew falls into a side hustle as a “party starter” for the area’s many weddings, bar mitzvahs and bat mitzvahs. He also tries to fall into a relationship with Domino, a young mother played by Dakota Johnson (who’s also credited as a producer), and her autistic daughter Lola (Vanessa Burghardt), who goes to school with Andrew’s brother David (Evan Assante).

Last year, Apple set a Sundance record when it paid $25 million for CODA, Sian Heder’s story of the only hearing member of a deaf family. The film featuring Oscar winner Marlee Matlin, Troy Kotsur and Emilia Jones (Locke & Key) won four awards at Sundance, and was a hit when it debuted on Apple TV Plus. Kotsur and the entire cast are each nominated for Screen Actors Guild awards, among others.

Like CODA, Cha Cha Real Smooth features a highly accessible and rather conventional story line that gently incorporates interactions between people grappling with a disability amid the broader world. In Cha Cha’s case, it’s the sweet friendship between the autistic Lola and Raiff’s Andrew.

News of the acquisition surfaced hours before Apple reported a record $124 billion in sales during its holiday quarter, mostly driven by iPhone sales, but also by vaulting growth in its Services category, which includes the TV Plus subscription service. Apple does not break out revenues for TV Plus and other components of Services, which reported an all-time high of $19.5 billion in quarterly revenues.

This week, Apple Original Films unit also announced a first-look deal with Skydance, the busy David Ellison-owned movie and TV production studio. The deal allows Skydance to continued its co-production and -financing relationship with ViacomCBS-owned Paramount Pictures on such giant franchises as Mission: Impossible, Star Trek, and Transformers, but secures another high-profile content producer for TV Plus.

Ellison, whose father and investor is Oracle’s Larry Ellison, has been an enormously productive and ambitious producer of blockbuster projects for more than a decade. His company’s episodic projects include the high-profile Foundation adaptation that debuted this fall on TV Plus, plus Netflix’s Altered Carbon and Grace and Frankie.

Sister Megan Ellison also has been a prolific film and TV producer, though focused on smaller projects, many of them Oscar-contending prestige projects through her Annapurna shingle.