A producer sued Netflix on Wednesday, alleging the streamer lost an unreleased copy of a new Nicolas Cage movie and seeking damages of at least $105 million. <\/p>\n
Producer Simon Afram invested more than $45 million of his own money making \u201cFortitude,\u201d a film that takes place during World War II and features actors including Cage, Sir Ben Kingsley <\/a>and Ron Perlman, according to the lawsuit. The movie, described as \u201cOcean\u2019s Eleven\u201d meets \u201cInglourious Basterds<\/a>,\u201d is based on Operation Fortitude, an effort during World War II in which double agents set a trap for Adolf Hitler and his armies. The movie has not yet been released and is seeking buyers. <\/p>\n \u201cFortitude\u201d had its own mystery last month when the drive that once held the movie went missing. <\/p>\n On June 15, Daniel Haido, an associate producer of \u201cFortitude,\u201d dropped off an unencrypted copy of the movie for Netflix to view and instructed the staff to delete the files after the screening. Haido also told Netflix to notify him when the drive was ready for pick up, but Netflix was unresponsive to several efforts to pick up the drive, the lawsuit said. On June 25, Netflix notified Haido that the drive had been stolen. <\/p>\n \u201cUnfortunately, someone stole a good amount of drives from our office desks this past week,\u201d Sean Berney, a director for original film at Netflix, wrote in a June 25 email, according to the lawsuit. \u201cWe\u2019ve been working through this with our security teams to no luck.\u201d <\/p>\n Berney in his email offered to reimburse Afram\u2019s company for the missing drive or create a new digital cinema package, according to the lawsuit. <\/p>\n But Afram in his lawsuit said the damage was much greater than that. He is seeking economic damages of at least $105 million, along with other costs. <\/p>\n \u201cBy losing control of the Film, Netflix destroyed that exclusivity and materially, if not completely, impaired the Film\u2019s marketability,\u201d his lawsuit said. \u201cIt is not fathomable that a sophisticated buyer would invest tens of millions of dollars to acquire the Film \u2014 and tens of millions more to market it \u2014 while facing the constant risk that it could appear online to be viewed widely for free at any time.\u201d<\/p>\n Netflix in a statement said it is conducting an investigation and is offering to monitor piracy sites for any unauthorized distribution or sale of the film. The streamer accused Afram\u2019s law firm of \u201chostile attempts to extort money from Netflix over this situation \u2014 including immediately demanding $165 million for the film rather than work with us in good faith.\u201d <\/p>\n \u201cNetflix disputes any claim that it bears the risk of loss for a film delivered without the proper industry-standard safeguards,\u201d the company said in a statement. \u201cWhile we do not own the rights to \u2018Fortitude,\u2019 we take content security seriously and have taken extra measures to support the filmmaker and his team.\u201d<\/p>\n Akerman LLP, one of the firms representing Afram in his lawsuit, declined to comment, citing pending litigation. Johnson & Johnson LLP did not immediately return a request for comment.<\/p>\n Regarding Netflix\u2019s statement, a spokesman for Afram said, \u201cOur lawsuit speaks for itself.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A producer sued Netflix on Wednesday, alleging the streamer lost an unreleased copy of a new Nicolas Cage…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":576299,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[243029,321,29992,243028,30965,93,1043,243027,61,60,71683,132740,3535,1020,1868,18539,243030,75605,32508],"class_list":["post-576298","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-afram","tag-celebrities","tag-damage","tag-daniel-haido","tag-drive","tag-entertainment","tag-film","tag-fortitude","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-june","tag-law-firm","tag-lawsuit","tag-movie","tag-netflix","tag-producer","tag-sean-berney","tag-streamer","tag-world-war-ii"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/576298","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=576298"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/576298\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/576299"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=576298"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=576298"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=576298"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}