“She was in love with the script”: the Halle Berry movie sued by the people who made it
Dark Tide isn’t a film that comes across as being worthy of the talents of Halle Berry. The critical and commercial flop sank like its many fellow Jaws-wannabe shark movies.
It is admittedly not the film Halle Berry says she would rather forget. Rather than being a horror thriller about overcoming personal demons, Dark Tide’s primary strategy was probably to highlight an Oscar-winning star in a bikini in the trailers and on an uncomfortable poster, hoping that would draw people in. Also starring Olivier Martinez and Ralph Brown, Dark Tide follows a diving instructor (Berry) who returns to her job a year after a deadly shark attack, with a reckless millionaire under her supervision who wants to swim with sharks unprotected. It remains one of the worst-reviewed movies in modern history.
But despite all that was lurking in its future, Berry was all in on the project. Director John Stockwell said (via blackfilm.com), “Halle Berry. She was in love with the script. I sat down with her and I loved her passion for it. I’ve always been of hers and wanted to work with her.” As advertised in the film’s clunky trailer, Stockwell was established as a director of sea adventure movies, namely Blue Crush and Into the Blue, neither of which were critical darlings but at least had a better platform to stand on.
“I obviously have work in the water before, […] and I knew I would be up for the challenge,” said Stockwell. However, this is only scratching the surface of what went wrong with Dark Tide. While plenty of actors and filmmakers have loved scripts that, due to a variety of reasons, couldn’t become good films, Dark Tide ended up in even worse waters thanks to a legal battle happening behind the scenes.
In June 2013, Jeanette Buerling and the Magnet Media Group sued Maggie Monteith, a former co-manager at MMG, alleging that the latter diverted money to projects other than Dark Tide while failing to deliver the marketing materials promised. Both Buerling and Monteith were producers on the Halle Berry film. When MMG started working on Dark Tide, Monteith became its distributor through her own company, Dignity Group.
According to MMG, Monteith was lent $500,000 of the $1.5 million needed to become the film’s distributor, as well as paid $160,000 to produce marketing such as a trailer. However, Monteith then separated from MMG and took the money with her, investing it into different companies. Monteith reportedly never raised the additional $1 million dollars needed for distribution and never returned the $160,000 for the promotional materials she did not deliver. The lawsuit sought the money that was owed to MMG plus an additional $1 million in compensatory damages and further relief.
The Hollywood Reporter did not further report on the Dark Tide lawsuit. Monteith is credited as an executive producer of the Oscar-winning documentary Searching for Sugar Man and continues to work as a producer. She was even a producer on this year’s critical flop but streaming hit My Oxford Year. It’s a strange Hollywood tale for sure, but at least Halle Berry still went on to star in modern classics like John Wick and Kingsman.
