“Terrible” or not, he's not as distant as many in Hollywood would have you believe. Netflix, for example, is on an unreleased Halle Berry sci-fi film, The Mothership, from Bridge of Spies co-writer Matthew Charman.
The case is interesting. Berry plays a single mother trying to raise her family after her husband mysteriously disappears. Then she discovers an alien mothership under the family farm: it may hold the key to her husband's disappearance! Who wouldn't want to watch Halle Berry battle aliens? Netflix, for one – the company's chief content officer, Bela Bajaria, said that everyone who had seen Mothership agreed it was “better not to watch it”.
Of course, you could say the same about Love Island – and look at its success. However, Bajaria stood firm.
“It doesn't happen very often, it's very rare,” he told a news conference. “When you think about how much we make, it's a rare thing. But it was a place where there were a lot of production issues, creative issues.”
Rare it may be – but not unheard of. The Hollywood archives are full of films destined to never see the light of day – the reasoning behind their expulsion is often shrouded in mystery. For example, as Oppenheimer star Cillian Murphy counts down to Oscar night next month, few have mentioned the obscure 2007 piece Hippie Hippie Shake, in which he starred opposite Sienna Miller in a retelling of the magazine's true story Oz. obscenity trial in 1970;
It was never released, the rumor being that it was simply too terrible to be challenged in public. “Finally, after asking many times, I was allowed to see a copy of the film, which I think is probably the worst film made in the 21st century,” said Felix Dennis, the Oz editor who starred in Hippie Hippie Shake from Chris O'Dowd. “Absolutely stinky… dog's breakfast.”
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