This story almost sounds too much like the plot of a movie. It takes seven years and $45 million to make a WWII movie with Nicolas Cage and Ben Kingsley. The person then brings a copy to Netflix’s main office so that they can look at it, but someone takes it from a desk. Not from the web. That isn’t through a very smart hack. From my desk at work.
The Swiss businessman Simon Afram is at the center of the Netflix Nicolas Cage Fortitude lawsuit. This week, he sent Netflix a $105 million complaint after the company admitted that it had lost a digital copy of his movie that wasn’t encrypted. Someone who delivered the drive tried to get it back for more than a week before they got an email confirming it. Netflix’s security teams couldn’t find anything after someone stole “a good amount of drives” from desks the week before. It sounds more like a text message your roommate would send you about a lost package than a business report.
Afram is being sued by people who say that Netflix had to protect the movie since the drive wasn’t encrypted. Like most businesses, Netflix thinks movies should be sent with encryption and a Key Delivery Message. But there is one important thing that the lawsuit doesn’t talk about: Netflix’s own instructions, which seemed to say that the keys should stay open during the screening window. Folks who work for Afram say they told the company that the DCP wasn’t encrypted and even asked that it be thrown away after the screening. Right now, it looks like the courts are deciding if that request was ever heard or met. “Fortitude” has not lived a quiet life. The lawsuit was filed against director Martin Scorsese in 2023. Afram said that Scorsese took $500,000 as an executive producer but did nothing to help the project. The people working for Scorsese told Afram that he was new to the business and had too high of hopes for how things work. It was over with that case in 2024. It’s the same movie that’s being sued over again. It’s important to know what this says. It’s not always that a project is having trouble when it has legal issues. Sometimes it’s just that the production ran into difficult people or situations at the wrong time.
Netflix says it is looking into the security breach and is taking it very seriously. It has also offered to keep an eye on sites that pirate music to find illegal copies. The movie hasn’t been seen anywhere yet, according to sources. Berney said in the first email that he thought the person who stole the drives probably didn’t want the data on them but just the hardware. That makes sense. It’s also a strange kind of luck for everyone if it’s true.
When Netflix counter-frames, things get really tricky. But the company said in a statement that it wouldn’t give Afram’s lawyers any information about the investigation because of “hostile attempts to extort money.” In that case, a demand for $165 million was made before the current $105 million suit was filed. From Afram’s point of view, they are being careless and won’t work together. Netflix thinks it’s an unfair amount of stress. You could say that each is partly true, but neither is the whole story.
There is a hidden belief in the industry that when a filmmaker signs a deal with a big platform, they are automatically responsible for security, even if the contract doesn’t say that. This lawsuit shows that belief. If a court agrees, that’s a different story.
