It’s safe to say that “Fortitude,” an as-yet-unreleased World War II-era Nicolas Cage thriller, won’t be showing up on Netflix anytime soon.
A lawsuit filed in California federal court Wednesday and obtained by TheWrap alleges that Netflix allowed an unencrypted copy of the movie to go missing from its offices earlier this year. The suit was filed by producer Simon Afram and his company, Op-Fortitude, and seeks $105 million in damages.
According to the lawsuit, Afram, the film’s producer and financier, sunk more than $45 million and seven years into the project. He alleges that the movie’s disappearance could jeopardize its ability to be sold and distributed elsewhere.
“Netflix disputes any claim that it bears the risk of loss for a film delivered without the proper industry-standard safeguards. While we do not own the rights to ‘Fortitude,’ we take content security seriously and have taken extra measures to support the filmmaker and his team,” Netflix said in a statement to media. “This includes conducting a thorough investigation and offering to monitor known piracy sites for any unauthorized distribution or sale. We have declined to share anything about our ongoing investigation with the law firm representing Simon Afram, given their hostile attempts to extort money from Netflix over this situation – including immediately demanding $165 million for the film rather than work with us in good faith.”
“Fortitude,” described as “in the vein of ‘Ocean’s Eleven’” in the lawsuit, stars Cage as Dusko Popov, a real-life Yugoslav spy during World War II who served as an inspiration for James Bond in Ian Fleming’s 007 novels and the subsequent films. The lawsuit alleges that the film’s DCP was delivered to Netflix and that, after the company screened the film June 16, “Netflix failed to provide promised instructions for picking up the unencrypted DCP for over a week.”
An email from Netflix quoted in the lawsuit stated that “someone stole a good amount of drives from our office desks this past week,” with a copy of “Fortitude” among them.
“The Film’s value depended in significant part on its exclusivity as an unreleased, first-to-market work. By losing control of the Film, Netflix destroyed that exclusivity and materially, if not completely, impaired the Film’s marketability,” the lawsuit reads. “It is not fathomable that a sophisticated buyer would invest tens of millions of dollars to acquire the Film—and tens of millions more to market it—while facing the constant risk that it could appear online to be viewed widely for free at any time.”
Sources close to Netflix say that, unlike other secure, password-protected versions of the movie, “Fortitude” was delivered without those safeguards. As soon as the Netflix team was alerted that the DCP was missing, they notified relevant parties, including Netflix’s internal security team, and found no evidence that the film had been leaked. Netflix does not own the rights to the film and is not legally responsible for it, but the company still worked to locate the missing copy.
The post Netflix Sued for $105 Million Over Stolen Nicolas Cage Movie appeared first on TheWrap.
