Apple Lands Cooper Raiff-Directed ‘Cha Cha Real Smooth’ In $15M World Rights Deal

Apple has closed the biggest deal of the virtual 2022 Sundance Film Festival, securing worldwide rights to the Cooper Raiff-directed Cha Cha Real Smooth for about $15 million. The streamer has been the front-runner for the picture since it premiered January 23 in the US Dramatic Competition category.

Starring Raiff and Dakota Johnson, the pic is his follow-up to his 2020 SXSW Grand Jury Prize-winning debut feature Shithouse. He plays a directionless college graduate in New Jersey who gets over his head in a relationship with a young mom and her autistic teenage daughter as he works a job party-starting bar and bat mitzvahs of his younger brother’s classmates. Leslie Mann, Brad Garrett, Vanessa Burghardt, Raul Castillo and Evan Assante also star.

Co-financed by Picturestart and Endeavor Content, Cha Cha Real Smooth is a real crowd pleaser. Raiff wrote the script and produced with Johnson, Ro Donnelly, Erik Feig and Jessica Switch. The exec producers are Jeff Valeri, Shayne Fiske Goldner and Julia Hammer.

The deal was brokered by ICM Partners, WME, and Endeavor Content.

It falls below the $25 million that Apple paid last Sundance for CODA, which remains the record for that festival. It surpasses the $7.5 million deal that Searchlight/Hulu closed today for Good Luck to You, Leo Grande. That one was just for U.S. rights.

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