Netflix Faces $105 Million Lawsuit Over a Nicolas Cage Movie That Simply Vanished

Netflix has weathered plenty of headline-grabbing controversies over the years, but few sound quite as strange as this one. A finished World War II thriller starring Nicolas Cage, one that took seven years and tens of millions of dollars to make, went missing from the streamer’s own offices, and now the fallout is turning into a very public legal fight.

The film at the center of it all is ‘Fortitude,’ a British spy thriller directed by Simon West and written by Simon Afram, starring Cage alongside Matthew Goode, Ed Skrein, Alice Eve, Michael Sheen, and Ben Kingsley. The story follows real British intelligence operatives who used elaborate deception campaigns, including fake armies and phantom military equipment, to mislead Nazi leadership during the war.

According to a new report from the New York Post, the LAPD is now investigating the theft of the film amid a $105 million lawsuit over its mysterious disappearance from Netflix’s offices. Writer and producer Simon Afram and his company, Op-Fortitude, filed the lawsuit on July 29 in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, alleging Netflix lost an unencrypted master copy of the film after receiving it for a screening.

The timeline laid out in the complaint is almost cinematic in its own right. Afram delivered an unencrypted digital cinema package to Netflix’s Sunset Bronson Studios office on June 15, ahead of a screening the following day, and was told to keep the film’s files active through June 16. Nine days later, the producers received a Netflix email stating that “someone stole a good amount of drives from our desks this past week,” including the one containing ‘Fortitude.’

Afram claims he personally invested more than $45 million and seven years of work into the project, and the lawsuit estimates the film needs to generate at least $112.5 million just to break even. The complaint argues the theft has effectively destroyed the movie’s commercial value, since any future buyer now has to weigh the risk that an unsecured, theatrical-quality copy could surface on piracy sites before release.

Tensions between the two camps appear to have soured well before the lawsuit was even filed. The producers accuse Netflix of stonewalling basic questions, including whether police were contacted at all, and claim the company brushed off a request to involve the LAPD even after the filmmakers filed their own report.

Netflix has firmly pushed back on the allegations. A company spokesperson said in a statement that Netflix “disputes any claim that it bears the risk of loss for a film delivered without the proper industry-standard safeguards,” adding that it doesn’t own the rights to ‘Fortitude’ but has taken content security seriously, including conducting an investigation and offering to monitor known piracy platforms.

The company also alleges that Afram’s legal team escalated things before real negotiation ever had a chance. Netflix says it declined to share details of its internal investigation with Afram’s lawyers after they made what the company called a “hostile attempt to extort money,” initially demanding $165 million for the film before the lawsuit was filed.

For now, at least according to current reporting, no copy of ‘Fortitude’ has surfaced on piracy sites, which may be the detail that ultimately determines how this all shakes out. If the film stays buried and eventually lands a distributor, the situation could quietly resolve itself. If a copy leaks first, Afram’s case, and the millions of dollars behind it, suddenly get a lot more concrete.

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