Embroiled in a $105m lawsuit with Netflix, the World War II thriller Fortitude now has a trailer. It features Nicolas Cage in full James Bond mode. Con Air director Simon West has re-united with actor Nicolas Cage for a new action thriller. Ordinarily, that might sound interesting enough to scare up interest by itself, at ... Fortitude | The $45m Nic Cage film allegedly stolen from Netflix has a trailer
Embroiled in a $105m lawsuit with Netflix, the World War II thriller Fortitude now has a trailer. It features Nicolas Cage in full James Bond mode.
Con Air director Simon West has re-united with actor Nicolas Cage for a new action thriller. Ordinarily, that might sound interesting enough to scare up interest by itself, at least among film fans of a certain age. But the story of the upcoming period spy thriller Fortitude has been overtaken somewhat by the real-world events surrounding it.
This is the film, you may remember, that writer-producer Simon Afram alleges was stolen from Netflix’s offices in June. According to the lawsuit filed by Afram and his production company Op-Fortitude, the streaming giant had requested to see a copy of Fortitude with a view to potentially acquiring it; a hard drive containing the film was then hand delivered, and said to have been taken from Netflix’s Los Angels offices during a break-in.
Netflix is now being sued for $105m, with the lawsuit alleging that the theft has damaged its chances of turning a profit.
One month on, the first trailer for Fortitude itself has emerged – and everything points to a crime caper in the mode of Guy Ritchie’s The Ministry Of Ungentlemanly Warfare.
Featuring an ensemble cast – Ed Skrein, Michael Sheen, Ben Kingsley, Art Malik, Cage – it’s about a British Intelligence effort to direct Nazi attention away from the real Operation Overlord campaign quietly being orchestrated in the background.
Fortitude also highlights the connection between Serbian spy Dusko Popov and James Bond; Cage plays the suave intelligence agent who’s said to have been an inspiration for 007, while Art Malik also appears in the film as Bond’s creator, Ian Fleming, himself an intelligence officer in WWII.
Read more: How the director of Con Air accidentally invented Rickrolling
The synopsis, if you like words in italics, goes like this:
FORTITUDE is based on an incredible true story and follows the fearless and unpredictable spy-soldiers Dudley Clarke (Ed Skrein) and Thomas Argyll “TAR” Robertson (Matthew Goode), as they devise the biggest deception mission ever mounted.
With the support of Winston Churchill (Michael Sheen), Ian Fleming (Art Malik) and an extraordinary network of double agents, among them Dusko Popov (Nicolas Cage), the real-life spy who inspired the James Bond novels, Juan Pujol (Jordi Mollà), a Spanish chicken farmer, and Nancy Armstrong (Alice Eve), a top British Intelligence agent, they create a spectacular master plan using a fictitious army, fake tanks, aircraft and ships, actors and false radio messages to fool Hitler’s Nazi Army in the build-up to D-Day. Operation FORTITUDE decisively changed the course of World War II and paved the way for a free world.
Fortitude has been independently produced on a budget of around $45m, and one thing to note about the debut trailer is that it doesn’t feature the logo for a distribution company. The spy caper is set for a cinema release in 2026; it’s currently unclear whether Op-Fortitude will self-distribute or whether a studio backer is still being sought. We suspect any kind of deal with Netflix will now be off the table, though.
We’ll bring you more on Fortitude’s release as we get it.
