There’s a scene that everyone who has ever worked in film acquisitions has probably seen before. Inside a studio office, a producer gives a drive to an employee, says something like “Delete it when you’re done,” and then leaves. It takes place in Hollywood many times a year. That same normal moment turned into the start of a $105 million lawsuit on June 15 at Netflix’s Sunset Bronson Studios in Los Angeles.
Fortitude is the movie in question. It is a spy thriller set during World War II and stars Nicolas Cage, Matthew Goode, Ed Skrein, and Alice Eve. It has not yet been released. From late 2025 to now, the producer, Simon Afram, had been talking to Netflix about a possible purchase. When executives asked for a working cut to screen internally, Afram’s team sent a physical drive with the film’s master copy that wasn’t encrypted. It was easy to understand: screen it, delete it, and let us know when it’s ready to be picked up.
After ten days, a Netflix executive told the filmmakers that the drive was no longer there. The items were stolen from employee desks along with a few others. The lawsuit says Netflix refused to confirm whether a police report was ever filed, so it’s still not clear when the theft happened or if Netflix reported it to the police.
What happened next is the kind of business communication that gets worse over time. Netflix’s head of film acquisitions, Sean Berney, admitted to the theft in an email that the lawsuit calls honest but limited: “a lot of drives were taken, security teams are working on it, and piracy teams are on alert.” Netflix later said that the other drives that were stolen were empty. So it looks like the copy with Fortitude was the only one that mattered—the one that shouldn’t have been unencrypted in the first place.
The way Netflix sees things is clear, and it makes some sense. The company says it can’t be held responsible for a movie that was sent without the right encryption used by the industry. That’s a good point up to a point. Most of the time, studios and streamers do want safe deliveries, which is exactly why DCP formats exist. But the filmmakers are making a strong counterargument: Netflix asked for the format it asked for, and the producer made it clear that the file wasn’t encrypted when it was delivered. A court will now have to decide if that warning changes who is responsible.
The lawsuit is really about money, and the argument behind it is stronger than it might seem. Even though there are interested buyers from both inside and outside of the United States, the filmmakers say they have stopped talks about distributing the film because any deal would legally require them to say that there is an unencrypted copy floating around somewhere. That information makes insurance more difficult, makes marketing less clear, and gives any future distributor a reason to be wary or ask for a lower price. A campaign to get awards, which seemed to be in the works, has also stopped. When they’re upset, it’s hard not to see the business sense behind it. A movie that could have sold easily now has an asterisk next to it that it might never get rid of.
Things got worse between the two sides when an attorney for Afram sent Netflix a demand for $165 million, which is more than what is being asked for in court. Netflix called it an attempt to get money from them. When the filmmakers sue for $105 million, they seem to be using their earlier demand as a negotiating chip. Any trust that might have existed between a streaming service that wants to buy a movie and a production team that wants to sell it has now been completely destroyed.
As I watch this happen, it’s not the amount of money or the famous person’s name that stands out. It’s the difference between how the movie business talks about protecting content and how it actually deals with physical assets when it buys things every day. Drives are still delivered by hand. People are still giving instructions orally. It looks like those drives sometimes just disappear from desks in the office, and no one notices until it’s too late.
Fortitude is still not out. Now, whether it ever gets a proper theater run may depend less on how good the movie is and more on how this lawsuit ends and whether that unencrypted copy ever shows up online.
