When we talk about a movie being “stolen,” we usually do so in pretty abstract terms: A digital copy being leaked, or maybe the film as a whole ending up on Plex servers and torrent sites. So it’s worth noting that when producer Simon Afram launched a $100 million-plus lawsuit against Netflix for allegedly letting his Nicolas Cage World War II thriller Fortitude get stolen back in June, he was being extremely literal: Somebody apparently walked off with the fucking thing.
This is per THR, which reports that Netflix had requested that Afram—whose track record as a producer doesn’t seem to extend far beyond this single film—send it a copy of Fortitude because it was interested in possibly running the film, which reunites Cage with his Con Air director Simon West for a real life spy story. Producers apparently complied by sending an unencrypted drive to the Netflix offices, with instructions to please delete the movie’s files after watching it. Ten days later, Netflix was forced to reveal that, whoops, the drive had been pilfered from somebody’s desk, and now an unencrypted master copy of Fortitude was now floating out in the wild somewhere. “This is a first for us,” the streamer’s head of acquisitions wrote in an email to Afram. “Unfortunately, someone stole a good amount of drives from our office desks this past week. We’ve been working through this with out security teams to no luck. Our piracy teams are on high alert with the breach and will monitor.” (Netflix later confirmed that all of the non-Fortitude drives were empty.)
Netflix, for its part, doesn’t grant that any of this is its fault: “Netflix disputes any claim that it bears the risk of loss for a film delivered without the proper industry-standard safeguards,” the company said in a statement. “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. This includes conducting a thorough investigation and offering to monitor known piracy sites for any unauthorized distribution or sale.” The company also says that, instead of trying to work with the streamer, Afram and his team immediately went for the nuclear option, sending legal threats demanding $165 million in exchange for the loss of the film, which made the streamer a bit more hesitant to loop them in their efforts to find these dastardly film thieves.
Afram’s argument is that having a pirated copy of Fortitude now floating around in the ether is going to be a huge issue as he attempts to negotiate a sale, presumably with, like, a password attached to the thing this time. After all, nobody likes gearing up to promote a new film just to have it suddenly pop up on the pirate sites, a worry that will now hang over the film—which also stars Matthew Goode, Ed Skrein, Jordi Mollà, and Alice Eve—in perpetuity.
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