Netflix Tosses Halle Berry Film

A film starring Halle Berry is headed for the waste bin. Netflix is canning the science-fiction film The Mothership, which has floundered in post-production for years, per Variety. It starred Berry as one half of a farming couple who finds herself a single mother when her husband mysteriously vanishes. A year later, she and her children find an alien object that puts them on a path to discover what became of their loved one. But the film directed by Matthew Charman, first teased for a 2022 release, "will now only exist in any tangible form as a line on a set of accounts" as "a tax write-off," writes Ben Child at the Guardian.

The Mothership had been in post-production since filming wrapped up in 2021. According to the InSneider newsletter, it was ultimately decided reshoots were needed, which posed a major problem since the film's child stars had aged three years. The budget for the film is unknown, though it likely totaled "tens of millions of dollars," writes Child. The move echoes Warner Bros. Discovery's scrapping of the $90 million flick Batgirl, which also required reshoots, in 2022. "In exchange for permanently deleting Batgirl from [its] servers," the company looking to find $3 billion in cost savings "enjoyed a tax write off that attacked just a little [of] its debt mountain," Film Studios reported. (More Netflix stories.)