Netflix Shelves Halle Berry Movie—Is This Fiscally Smart?

This week, Jeff Sneider broke the news that the Halle Berry movie, The Mothership, produced by Netflix, will be shelved indefinitely.

The film was written and directed by Matt Charman, produced by Fred Berger and Brian Kavanaugh-Jones, and starred Halle Berry along with Omari Hardwick, Molly Parker, John Ortiz, and Paul Guilfoyle.

The reasoning, as outlined in Sneider's article, was that the film is said to need a ton of reshoots, and the child actors in it have grown significantly since they last shot in 2021. However, additional info says Netflix wasn't as concerned with the reshoots as the long post and delays.

Of course, with this news, along with the controversial Batgirl and Coyote Vs. Acme news from Max (among other titles), there is the question of how all this makes fiscal sense for these studios.

These movies are expensive, so I understand the hesitancy to keep putting money into them. But the casual shelving of something mostly shot because it took a while to edit, for a streamer that doesn't care about release dates, feels inexcusable.

So why is this happening again and again?

The answer is simply "insurance." If you take a total loss on the movie, insurance will bail your studio out. But this answer is not creating a sustainable environment to make movies.

Imagine being an actor, director, or writer on one of these projects. How can you keep your career moving up the ladder if what you work on gets buried? Projects like this can take years, and if you leave with nothing to show for it, it can halt or at least delay momentum.

Look, we can argue quality all day, but if insurance companies keep offering studios these financial bailouts, they're going to take them over and over again at any slight bump in the road. These places are risk-averse and will completely deprioritize art if they think they can save a buck.

The fact is, we will never know how this movie, or the ones like it would have turned out, because the process was never finished.

And if we set this precedent now, we're going to regret it in the future.

Let me know what you think in the comments.