On 25 June, an email from Netflix’s head of film acquisitions landed in the inbox of the producers of Fortitude. “This is a first for us,” wrote Sean Berney. “Unfortunately, someone stole a good amount of drives from our office desks this past week. We’ve been working through this with our security teams to no luck.” The message confirmed what the filmmakers had feared since they hand-delivered a hard drive to the streaming giant’s Hollywood office ten days earlier: the unencrypted master copy of their unreleased Second World War spy thriller, starring Nicolas Cage, was gone.

The film’s writer and producer, Swiss businessman Simon Afram, had spent seven years and more than $45 million of his own fortune shepherding Fortitude to completion. Directed by Simon West, the picture reconstructs the real-life Allied deception campaign Operation Fortitude, with Cage playing the Serbian double agent Duško Popov—a playboy spy whose exploits are widely believed to have inspired Ian Fleming’s James Bond. The cast includes Ben Kingsley, Matthew Goode, Michael Sheen and Alice Eve. Afram’s journey had already been fraught: in 2023 he sued Martin Scorsese, alleging the director accepted $500,000 to serve as executive producer but did nothing to advance the project; that case was settled out of court the following year.

The disappearance of the hard drive has plunged the film into a new crisis. According to the lawsuit filed on 30 July in federal court in California, the associate producer who delivered the Digital Cinema Package on 15 June explicitly told Netflix the copy was unencrypted and asked that the files be deleted after the private screening. The complaint cites Netflix’s own delivery instructions, which stated: “If the DCP is encrypted, please have the keys open from the time the asset lands through EOD on 6/16.” The producers argue they followed those instructions and that Netflix had a duty to secure the material, not leave it on a desk where it could be stolen.

Afram and his company Op-Fortitude are seeking at least $105 million in damages, contending that the theft has “destroyed that exclusivity and materially, if not completely, impaired the film’s marketability.” Any prospective distributor, they note, would have to be informed that an unencrypted copy was stolen before release, a disclosure that could derail acquisition negotiations, complicate insurance, and heighten piracy risks. Netflix disputes responsibility, stating that it “bears the risk of loss for a film delivered without the proper industry-standard safeguards.” The company says it has conducted an internal investigation, offered to monitor known piracy sites, and claims that Afram’s legal team initially demanded $165 million in what it calls a “hostile attempt at extortion.” The producers, meanwhile, allege that Netflix has refused to say whether it filed a police report or involved the Los Angeles Police Department.

No evidence has yet emerged that Fortitude has leaked online. Berney’s email speculated that the thieves may have taken the drives simply to sell as scrap. Yet the film’s fate remains suspended in a peculiar limbo: a finished, star-driven espionage thriller, years in the making, whose commercial future may have been decided not by a studio executive but by an opportunistic theft from an office desk. The missing hard drive, unencrypted and unaccounted for, has become a ghost in the machine of modern content distribution.