The ‘Masters of the Air’ Trailer Is Here, and It Looks Like Two Hundred Million Bucks

Robert Viglasky

Move over Dunkirk and Top Gun, because there’s a new high-octane project about aerial warfare, and it’s coming to Apple TV+. Even by modern prestige-TV standards, Masters of the Air features a stacked cast, headlined by newly minted A-listers Austin Butler, Barry Keoghan, and Ncuti Gatwa, along with other young talents like Callum Turner, Raff Law, and Anthony Boyle playing members of the 100th Bombardment Group a.k.a. “The Bloody Hundredth,” a U.S. Air Force squadron tasked with bombing Nazi-occupied territory. The show is based on Donald L. Miller’s book of the same name, which drew on interviews with both military members and civilians involved in and impacted by the newfound aerial warfare of World War II.

“The history of the American air war against Germany is the story of an experiment: the testing of a new idea of warfare,” Miller wrote. “American bomber crews learned to fight the air war by experience and experiment, every mission a learning exercise. It was a special kind of experience, different from that of the ground forces.”

The first trailer features gorgeous cinematography, with multiple shots of the bombers flying at dawn. (The cinematography team is headlined by Adam Arkapaw, who has done terrific work on the first season of True Detective and Top of the Lake.) “We came from every corner of the country with a common purpose: to bring the war to Hitler’s doorstep,” a character says in narration, while Butler explains that these kinds of high-visibility missions are “suicide.” This initial trailer also shows every bit of the $200 million-plus budget, with the kind of grand scale combat scenes more commonly associated with films like 1917 or Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan.

Produced by Tom Hanks and Spielberg, Masters of the Air is the duo's third WWII-centric series after 2001’s Band of Brothers and 2010’s The Pacific. The pair previously drew upon Miller’s D-Days in the Pacific for research on the latter show.

“Tom and Steven have always wanted to visualize cinematically what our author Don Miller has called, this ‘singular event in the history of warfare,’” co-producer Gary Goetzman said in a press quote shared by Variety.

The nine-episode series will feature direction from Mudbound’s Dee Rees, Captain Marvel’s Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, and No Time to Die’s Cary Joji Fukunaga. The show finished shooting in the fall of 2021; it's been posited that the lengthy delays between its wrap and release could have to do with allegations against Fukunaga, including a Rolling Stone story that he had a history of making young women uncomfortable, including on the Masters of the Air set. Since these women came forward, Fukunaga has worked very little, though he is still reportedly tied to a Spielberg-led Napoleon Bonaparte series modeled on Stanley Kubrick’s infamous aborted project about the French military leader.

Masters of the Air begins its run on January 26 with two episodes, after which one will be released weekly.

Originally Appeared on GQ