In June, hard drives holding an encrypted copy of an unreleased film were stolen from Netflix's Los Angeles offices. The film is Fortitude, a Second World War thriller starring Nicolas Cage, and its producers say roughly $45 million went into making it. [1]
This week, writer-producer Simon Afram and his company Op-Fortitude sued Netflix for $105 million. [1]
The two numbers are doing different jobs, and the difference is the case. Forty-five million is what was spent. One hundred and five million is what the producers say the loss is worth, which for an unreleased film means the value of first release itself, a thing that exists only once and cannot be restored by recovering the drives.
Netflix's response is a custody argument: the filmmakers failed to use industry-standard safeguards. [1]
That defence is worth stating fairly, because encryption and handling protocols are genuinely the supplier's responsibility in many distribution agreements, and the copy was encrypted. It is also, in plain terms, an argument that the material's owners should have protected it better from the building it was sitting in.
What a court will decide is narrow and specific: what the contract said about custody, whether the encryption met the agreed standard, and whether a theft from the distributor's own premises falls inside the distributor's duty of care. What the industry will read from it is broader. Independent producers hand finished films to platforms constantly, and the answer to who bears the risk while the file sits on the platform's servers and desks is currently unsettled enough to be worth $105 million to litigate.
