Netflix’s decision to scrap a nearly completed movie starring Halle Berry has been described as “a rare thing” during a preview event this week.
Post-production on The Mothership, a sci-fi thriller that finished filming in 2021, was scrapped last week with rumours of “significant reshoots” being too expensive and problems over using child actors who have since aged.
On Wednesday’s event, Bela Bajaria, the streamer’s chief content officer and interim chief of the film division, said: “If you think about how many things we make, it’s a rare thing.”
The film starred the Oscar winner as a mother finding an extraterrestrial object on her farm. It came from the British writer-director Matthew Charman, who received an Oscar nomination for his Bridge of Spies script.
“It’s hard to go, ‘Are there lessons in that?’ It happens so rarely,” Bajaria said. “And you have to remember there are 100, 150 people that come together, and alchemy and chemistry, and it’s a creative endeavor, and everything doesn’t turn out how we want it to be. And on that one, there was just a lot of issues during production and stuff, creatively, so everybody just felt like it was the right thing to not do it and do something else together eventually.”
Berry is working with Netflix on the upcoming Mark Wahlberg thriller The Union.
Charman, Berry and the film’s producers have yet to make any statement.
The news follows other similarly scrapped films, such as the $90m DC adventure Batgirl, which was cancelled while in post-production, and last year’s reveal that Coyote vs Acme would also not be released despite completion of production. Both were the result of the Warners studio choosing a tax write-down. The latter, a live-action/animation hybrid starring John Cena, has since been shopped around. Last year Netflix decided not to release two completed films – thrillers The Inheritance and House/Wife – but allowed the makers to shop them elsewhere.
In 2022, Netflix also stopped production on animated film Cattywampus, from Gore Verbinski, director of The Ring and Rango.
