The Halle Berry movie that was deleted from history: “It was better to not watch it”
In 2022, something unprecedented began happening in Hollywood. All of a sudden, nearly completed movies were scrapped entirely by their studios, with Warner Bros being the worst offender for a practice which upset talent and moviegoers alike.
Try as people might, they couldn’t quite understand why a studio would choose to never release potential moneymakers like Batgirl, Coyote vs Acme, and Scoob: Holiday Haunt, especially as they were all based on recognised IP. Ultimately, though, the scuttlebutt was that the decision was driven purely by the almighty dollar, as the financially troubled Warner supposedly used the films as tax write-offs, recouping much of their outlay without the risk of releasing a potential box office dud.
After an initial backlash to Hollywood’s unsavoury new tactic, things seemed to settle down for a while. But then, in January 2024, Netflix got in on the act, announcing that it had made the tough call to cancel the release of Halle Berry’s The Mothership, a sci-fi movie that had been in development at the streamer since 2021. Was this another case of a money-grubbing studio protecting its losses at the expense of human creativity, or was the truth more nuanced than that?
Well, a month later, Netflix’s chief content officer, Bela Bajaria, addressed why the company chose to delete The Mothership from history. “It doesn’t happen very often,” she conceded at a press conference. “If you think about how many things we make, it’s a rare thing.”
Now, while it might seem odd for a chief content officer to highlight that her company releases a metric ton of material on its platform, much of it of highly questionable quality, Bajaria hit on something that was making observers scratch their heads in confusion. The idea that any one movie could be so much worse than most of the slop Netflix gladly releases was baffling, so people assumed the cancellation of The Mothership two and a half years after it finished shooting had to be about money. Not so, said Bajaria.
“It was one where there were lots of production issues, creative issues,” Bajaria claimed, “and everybody on both sides, the talent and us, just agreed that it was better to not watch it. Everybody just felt like it was the right thing to not do it, and to do something else together eventually.”
So, if Bajaria was to be believed, Netflix, Berry, and presumably director Matthew Charman all decided that the production of The Mothership was so torturous that they all agreed it was better to ensure nobody ever saw the movie. This sounded preposterous in the extreme, and hugely dispiriting for Charman, who was supposed to make his directorial debut with the film.
Thankfully, Hollywood insider Jeff Sneider offered slightly more clarity in his newsletter, publishing a quote from an unnamed source who claimed that something about The Mothership’s lengthy post-production process meant it “couldn’t” be completed satisfactorily. Unfortunately for Charman, the film starred a couple of child actors in prominent roles, and when creative issues forced reshoots, which were then delayed, the kids had noticeably aged in between. Rather than face a similar situation to Stranger Things, whose primary cast went from fresh-faced pre-teens to looking like they had mortgages to pay within four seasons, the streamer chose to cut bait entirely.
In the end, neither Berry nor Charman commented publicly on the film being memory-holed. However, both were quickly furnished with other Netflix projects: Berry starred in the dreadful action comedy The Union, while Charman was installed as showrunner on In the Room, a limited series starring Suranne Jones.
