Nicolas Cage's "Fortitude" Producer Hits Netflix With Defamation Claim

Producer Simon Afram has expanded his lawsuit against Netflix over a stolen copy of the unreleased Nicolas Cage film “Fortitude,” adding a defamation claim after the streamer publicly accused his legal team of attempting to extort the company. The amended complaint, filed this week in federal court, escalates a dispute that already sought $105 million in damages over the theft of an unencrypted master copy of the World War II thriller from Netflix’s Los Angeles offices earlier this year.

The original suit alleged that a producer hand-delivered the film’s digital cinema package to Netflix’s Sunset Bronson Studios office on June 15 so executives could evaluate the film for possible acquisition, instructing the company to delete the files after screening and warning that the copy was unencrypted.

Ten days later, Netflix told the filmmakers the drive had gone missing along with several others taken from office desks. Afram, who spent seven years and roughly $45 million bringing “Fortitude” to the screen, said the theft has frozen efforts to sell the film, since any buyer would have to weigh the risk of a pirated version surfacing online.

The defamation claim centers on a statement Netflix issued after the initial lawsuit became public, in which the company said it had withheld details of its internal investigation because of “hostile attempts to extort money from Netflix,” including what it described as an immediate demand for $165 million.

Afram’s amended filing disputes that timeline directly, stating that his attorneys’ first letter to Netflix on June 29 asked only for information and a meeting, with no dollar figure attached. According to the filing, Netflix refused that request the next day, and only after that refusal, on July 1, did Afram’s team raise the $165 million figure to cover the film’s lost exclusivity.

Netflix has maintained that it bears no responsibility for a film delivered without industry-standard encryption, and has offered to monitor piracy sites for unauthorized copies. “Fortitude” stars Cage alongside Ben Kingsley, Matthew Goode and Ron Perlman, and dramatizes the real Allied deception campaign that misled Nazi Germany ahead of the D-Day invasion. The film remains without a distributor while the case proceeds.