From the history of Apple: The first exclusive film on iTunes

In November 2007, the film Purple Flowers became the first feature film to be released exclusively on the iTunes platform. Purple Flowers, a romantic comedy directed by Edward Burns, starred Selma Blair, Debra Messing and Patrick Wilson. With limited offerings from mainstream Hollywood players, filmmakers are pinning their hopes on iTunes distribution as an alternative way to get their film to audiences. How did it (fail) work?

Purple Flowers premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in April 2007 to overwhelmingly positive reviews. However, the producers received few decent offers to distribute the $4 million film. As a result, director Burns began to worry about whether the creators would be able to financially cover the marketing of their film enough to get enough exposure to potential viewers.

Therefore, the producers decided to bypass the traditional theatrical release and make the film available on the Apple iTunes platform. Purple Flowers thus became the first feature film to debut commercially exclusively on iTunes. The milestone comes two years after the iTunes store began offering downloadable video content, and a year after Disney became the first studio to offer its movies for download on the virtual iTunes platform.

The premiere of the film on iTunes was still a risky and relatively unexplored matter, but at the same time, many film studios began to gradually explore this possibility. A month before Purple Flowers debuted, Fox Searchlight released a thirteen-minute short as part of promotion for Wes Anderson's then-upcoming feature The Darjeeling Limited. Downloads of the mentioned short film reached approximately 400.

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"We're really early in the movie business," Apple's vice president of iTunes, Eddy Cue, told The New York Times at the time. “Obviously we're interested in all the Hollywood movies, but we also like the opportunity to be a great distribution tool for the small ones,” he added. At the time, iTunes sold more than 4 million downloadable movies, including short films. At the same time, the number of titles for sale hovered around a thousand.

The purple flowers have fallen into half oblivion today. But one thing definitely cannot be denied to them – their creators were ahead of their time in a way by deciding to distribute the film exclusively on iTunes.