Lionsgate Exits Gerard Butler’s ‘The Plane’ Over COVID

Lionsgate has withdrawn from plans to distribute the upcoming Gerard Butler thriller “The Plane” as a result of the producers have been unable to acquire manufacturing insurance coverage for the movie that may cowl a COVID-19 outbreak, based on a person with data of the state of affairs.

Lionsgate had boarded the movie a 12 months in the past on the American Film Market (AFM), selecting up distribution rights for territories that included North America, Latin America, the U.Ok., and India.

Butler was set to star as business pilot Ray Torrance, who after a heroic job of efficiently touchdown his storm-damaged plane in a battle zone, finds himself caught between the agendas of a number of militias that plan to take the airplane and its passengers hostage. As the world’s authorities and media seek for the disappeared plane, the pilot should rise to the event and preserve his passengers protected lengthy sufficient for assist to reach.

MadRiver International, which initially dealt with the worldwide gross sales for “The Plane,” and domestic-rights vendor CAA Media Finance are at present out to different distributors that may be capable of self-insure the undertaking.

The movie’s producers are Di Bonaventura Pictures’ Lorenzo di Bonaventura and Mark Vahradian, MadRiver Pictures’ Marc Butan and Ara Keshishian, and Gerard Butler and Alan Siegel below their G-BASE banner.

The preliminary plan was to shoot the movie in Malaysia final month, however when COVID circumstances began spiking within the nation, the filmmakers thought-about taking pictures as a substitute within the Dominican Republic and right here within the United States. Since a location couldn’t be locked down, and the manufacturing begin was pushed again, Lionsgate determined to withdraw from the undertaking.

As TheWrap beforehand reported, many Hollywood firms nonetheless can’t head again into manufacturing on movie and TV tasks due to one main roadblock: Insurers have made no strikes to include pandemic protection into insurance policies, leaving massive studios to self-insure and smaller manufacturing firms to hunt expensive alternate options — or gamble on taking pictures with none protection in any respect.

Deadline first reported the information about “The Plane.”