Netflix Chief Content Officer Says Axing Halle Berry Movie ‘The Mothership’ Was “A Rare Thing” For Streamer

Anthony D'Alessandro
·2 min read
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Last week, Netflix did what is unfortunately becoming common practice around Hollywood: They killed a nearly completed movie, Halle Berry’s sci-fi title The Mothership.

Essentially, the Matthew Charman-directed movie was in postproduction, and for all the changes that were required, it would have been impossible to do reshoots on the title completed in 2021 due to the child actors who are now grown up.

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No bruised eyes: Reportedly, MRC and the pic’s producers Automatik were fully onboard with the decision, with Netflix pointing out that they’re still in business with Berry on an upcoming Mark Wahlberg action title The Union (August 16), not to mention the streamer has a film deal with the Best Actress Oscar winner.

While it’s been a motif for the David Zaslav-run Warner Bros Discovery to kill movies (re Batgirl, Coyote vs. Acme and Scoob! Holiday Haunt) at Netflix, Chief Content Officer Bela Bajaria says, such axing “doesn’t happen very often.”

“It is very rare,” Bajaria said at the streamer’s 2024 film, TV and game slate press conference Wednesday night. “If you think about how many things we make, it’s a rare thing.”

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Expounding on the practicality of The Mothership decision, she added that there were “lots of production issues” and “everybody on both sides, the talent and us all, just agreed that it was better to not launch it.”

She continued, “It’s hard to go, ‘Are there lessons in that?’ It happens so rarely. And you have to remember there are 100, 150 people that come together, and alchemy and chemistry, and it’s a creative endeavor, and everything doesn’t turn out how we want it to be.”

“And on that one, there was just a lot of issues during production and stuff, creatively, so everybody just felt like it was the right thing to not do it and do something else together eventually,” she said.

The Mothership follows Berry’s character Sara Morse, whose husband vanishes from their rural farm. In the wake of her life as a single mother, her children discover an extraterrestrial object underneath their home, which lends clues to their father’s disappearance.

The start-and-stop of animated movies is quite common for any motion picture studio. Back in September 2022, Netflix put the brakes on Gore Verbinski’s feline outer space movie Cattywumpus, which he began production on; the director is attempting to shop the project elsewhere.

The TheInsneider first had the news about The Mothership‘s cancellation last week.

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