Who Stole Nic Cage’s New Movie?

Like something out of a heist movie I would happily pay $16.50 to see, a hard drive containing an unencrypted copy of what will now likely be an even hotter movie—Fortitude—was stolen out of Netflix’s Los Angeles office in June, according to a new lawsuit filed by Simon Afram, the film’s writer and producer and, Page Six notes, a Swiss billionaire. (As far as I can tell, that detail is neither here nor there for the purposes of the lawsuit, but it is an incredible background note if you are developing a character for a heist movie.)

The film stars Nicolas Cage, himself no stranger to movies involving stealing things (though I wouldn’t classify The Rock or National Treasure as strictly heist movies; come to my TED Talk for that full digression), as “Dusko Popov, a real-life World War II spy and playboy who served as the inspiration for Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels,” as Page Six puts it. 

And like any good heist plot, this one involved innovation: Sean Berney, Netflix’s head of acquisitions, said that this had never happened before. “This is a first for us,” he wrote in an email to the plaintiffs on June 25, as the Guardian reported. “Unfortunately, someone stole a good amount of drives from our office desks this past week. We’ve been working through this with our security teams to no luck. Our piracy teams are on high alert with the breach and will monitor.”

Learning about this theft revealed to me that the film-selling process is still somewhat old school. According to The Hollywood Reporter, after Netflix expressed interest in buying the distribution rights to Fortitude, a producer dropped off a hard drive the movie on it on June 15, along with instructions to wipe the drive once the Netflix team had watched the film. Sometime in the 10-day window between drop off and Berney’s email, the hard drive was stolen, along with a bunch of other ones (though Netflix says its internal investigation found that the other hard drives were empty). 

Interestingly, Afram’s lawsuit says Netflix refused to cooperate with the Los Angeles Police Department. All I’m saying is that would be a great piece of exposition in a heist film! 

The movie cost only (“only”) $45 million to make, but Afram is suing for $105 million, arguing that, because the Fortitude team has to tell potential buyers the movie could already be out there, the theft is hindering the sales process, and could further impact everything from insurance to marketing. 

Fortitude also stars Matthew Goode (a must have for any UK-set period drama), Ben Kingsley, and Michael Sheen, and you can bet your bottom dollar that I will be seated whenever it finally hits the big screen. (Or the small screen in my living room—but it doesn’t really seem like this potential Netflix deal is going to work out.) 

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