Something major was stolen from Netflix—and it wasn’t the Declaration of Independence.
The streaming giant is being sued for $105 million by production company Op-Fortitude after it lost an unencrypted copy of the unreleased Nicolas Cage-led film Fortitude, which the production company says compromised the World War II thriller’s success.
The July 29 complaint obtained by E! News alleged that associate producer Daniel Haido hand-delivered an unencrypted master copy of the film, known as a digital cinema package (DCP), on June 15 to Netflix’s Hollywood studios.
Haido allegedly verbally advised an employee at the streaming service—which was a potential buyer for the project also starring Sir Ben Kingsley, Ron Perlman and Ed Skrein—that the files should “be deleted after the screening” since it was unencrypted, according to the lawsuit.
More than a week after dropping off the drive, filmmakers allegedly received a message from Netflix—which has denied any wrongdoing in the incident—sharing that the files had been stolen. According to the lawsuit, an exec wrote in a June 25 email that “someone stole a good amount of drives from our office desks this past week” and that the company was already “working through this with [its] security teams to no luck.”