A disaster movie about a jet that crashes into the ocean on its way to Beijing has been put on hold because of its similarities to the missing Malaysian plane.
[full]Arclight Films, the company behind Deep Water, said Wednesday that pre-production has been halted for the time being.
“We’re delaying it out of respect for what’s going on,” Managing Director Gary Hamilton said.
An international search effort is scouring a remote stretch of the southern Indian Ocean for a Malaysia Airlines jet that disappeared March 8 en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. Malaysian officials said this week that the jet likely crashed in the sea, taking the lives of all 239 people on board.
“It’s a pretty tragic event,” Hamilton said at Hong Kong’s Filmart trade show.
He played down the similarities, saying the “movie that is not actually the same, it just deals with a plane crash.”
The film is about a flight from Sydney to Beijing that goes down in the ocean, leaving an air marshal and a handful of surviving passengers and crew to fight off giant tiger sharks and other dangers.
According to a synopsis of the film posted on the company’s website: “As the downed aircraft takes on water with every passing second, the surviving passengers and crew must face terror beyond reckoning.”
The movie is a loose follow-up to the 2012 film Bait, about a shark terrorising shoppers in an Australian supermarket flooded by a tsunami.
Government film agency Screen Australia was funding “Deep Water,” which was budgeted at $25million and was to be a co-production with China, according to a report last year by Australian publication Inside Film.[/full]