Brad Pitt will play a daredevil ironworker walking steel beams above 1970s New York

Brad Pitt might be closing in on 63, but if you thought he’d start taking things easy, think again. Having just wrapped work with David Fincher on The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth and starring in Edward Berger’s thriller The Riders, Pitt is off to yet another project—this one helmed by Darius Marder, director of Sound of Metal. Not content to simply act, Pitt’s also executive producing the new film, called Connector, for Apple Original Films. That makes three major projects lined up in fairly quick succession. Anyone else feeling tired just reading that?

Connector is the latest Apple and Plan B collaboration, with previous films F1 and Wolfs already hitting cinemas this year.

What is Connector?

Let’s get stuck into the details. Connector is written by Darius Marder and his sister Nina Marder, based on a story from Derek Cianfrance—if that name rings a bell, he’s the man behind Blue Valentine and The Place Beyond the Pines. The film is set in 1970s New York and spotlights a working-class legend: a sky-walking ironworker, meaning someone who basically dances about on steel beams high above the city, who ends up taking on forces bigger than himself. If this sounds a little more poetic than your average blue-collar drama, Marder’s style should fit it perfectly.

If you saw his debut feature, Sound of Metal, you’ll get why this pairing makes sense. That film, with Riz Ahmed as a metal drummer whose world collapses when he goes deaf, made a serious critical splash—six Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, and two wins. It was all about immersive, grounded intensity. Expect Connector to try and do for New York steelworkers what Sound of Metal did for heavy-metal gigs, hopefully without the tinnitus.

Apple, Plan B, and More on the Slate

This isn’t the first time Apple Original Films has teamed up with Pitt’s production outfit, Plan B. This year, they’ve already joined forces with Pitt on both F1 and Wolfs. Their next team-up after Connector is a bit of an odd one: a sci-fi thriller called The Waffle House Index. This stars Inde Navarrette (who made waves with Obsession) and is directed by Louis Paxton, with a script by Andrew Nunnelly. The title comes straight from an actual FEMA disaster-metric—the real-world sort where Waffle House restaurants staying open or shut during storms gets used to measure how bad things are.

• The Waffle House Index: Focuses on Jane (Navarrette), a graveyard-shift worker just trying to survive a monster storm at her local Waffle House—alongside much weirder threats than dodgy sausages and dodgy customers.

So, seeing as Pitt’s preparing to dangle from skyscrapers in 1970s New York while Navarrette faces supernatural chaos on the night shift, Apple and Plan B clearly aren’t short on ambition right now—even if the logic sometimes feels a bit feverish.