The director accused of taking $55m from Netflix – and blowing it on crypto and cars

Telegraph

20-03-2025

It is commonplace in Hollywood today for television series and films to be commissioned at far too large a budget for them to enjoy the success that their producers and studios hope for. Very occasionally, someone sees the light and pulls the plug on the unfinished product before it can run up even higher bills, with no chance of return. Yet the case of the director Carl Rinsch, who has been arrested for allegedly defrauding Netflix of $11 million, is something else.
With the exception of Die Hard and Predator film-maker John McTiernan, who eventually ended up being imprisoned as a result of the awful behind-the-scenes shenanigans on his dire 2002 remake of Rollerball, Hollywood directors do not generally blur the line between personal liability and artistic investment. Yet Rinsch has been indicted for taking money that was intended to fund a Netflix sci-fi television series named White Horse, and instead spending on it a wide range of luxury items.
The indictment has been made public, and it makes for eye-popping reading, as well as a Gatsbyian insight into how the rich – or would-be rich – live. Rinsch is said to have spent money that he received from Netflix on 'a number of extremely risky purchases of securities, including call options on a biopharmaceutical company' (which the indictment drily notes 'were not successful'), as well as significant cryptocurrency investments. Yet he didn't stint on his own personal comforts either, apparently.
The indictment lists the various purchases that he made during the time that he was employed to work on the show, and they are significant. They include nearly $2 million on credit card bills, nearly $400,000 for accommodation at the Four Seasons hotel and various rental properties, 'approximately $3,787,000 on furniture and antiques, including approximately $638,000 to purchase two mattresses and approximately $295,000 on luxury bedding and linens', millions of dollars on cars, watches and clothing, and, hilariously, over $1 million on lawyers who were hired to sue Netflix for even more money.
Were Rinsch an A-list director, or even someone with proven previous success, then he might have felt justified in asking for some of these extravagant luxuries. Yet his career, to date, is an undistinguished one that inadvertently shines a light on how many streaming companies are wasting vast amounts of money in pursuit of projects that may well never come to fruition, as long as some A-list star names are attached.
That Rinsch had been making up fantastical stories from a young age – claiming that his father was a spy and that he grew up in Africa, whereas in fact he was the son of an insurance executive and he came of age in San Fernando Valley in California – did not bode well for what came next.
The director came to prominence in 2010 when his short film The Gift, about a KGB agent delivering a mysterious present, won the Bronze Award at the Cannes Lions awards, along with the newly-created Film Craft Lion for Special Effects. This launched Rinsch, who had been directing advertisements for Mercedes and Heineken for the prestigious Ridley Scott Associates company, into the big leagues, and he was linked to some of the highest-profile projects going, including a remake of the Seventies classic Logan's Run and an Alien prequel.
When it was announced in 2009 that he would instead be entrusted by Universal with 47 Ronin, a samurai epic to star Keanu Reeves, the film industry title Variety archly noted that 'it is unusual to see a first-timer entrusted to helm a film with a large budget and tent pole aspirations.'
47 Ronin was intended to be a cross between Gladiator, 300 and The Last Samurai, harnessing the star power of Reeves, the then-popular 3D format and respected Japanese actors including the future Shogun star Hiroyuki Sanada. When Rinsch was handed a $175 million budget, The Hollywood Reporter called it 'a large-scale, downright risky' gamble.
According to reports, filming did not go well, not least because Rinsch insisted on shooting scenes twice, once in Japanese and once in English. Speaking to The Wrap, those involved in the production described it as a 'nightmare', and Rinsch was removed from the film's editing process, after a series of expensive reshoots were designed to make Reeves (the only A-list star in the production) more prominent.
Such was the potential for embarrassment, The Wrap reported, the final post-production process was personally overseen by Universal chief Donna Langley – even as the budget ballooned to a rumoured $225 million. It was estimated that 47 Ronin would have needed to make around $500 million at the box office just to break even; in the event, it struggled to take over $150 million, making it one of the biggest flops in Hollywood history.
It even flopped in Japan, where local audiences were discomfited by the casting of Reeves and the undue prominence of a white, American star in what should have been their story. It received dire, bemused reviews, and although a straight-to-Netflix sequel, Blade of the 47 Ronin, was eventually released in 2022, Rinsch and Reeves were no longer involved.
Usually, when a filmmaker is deemed responsible for such an egregious flop, it spells the end of their career. There is a reason why the expression 'director jail' is commonly used in the industry, although, to date, only McTiernan has actually spent time in real jail. Rinsch returned to his previous career directing commercials, and under normal circumstances, he would not have been heard from again.
Yet he had sufficiently impressed Reeves while the two were working together for the actor to contribute funds to a series of short films that Rinsch had developed with his Uruguayan fashion designer and model wife Gabriela Rosés, revolving around an AI-generated species named 'Organic Intelligent'. It was potentially visionary and far-reaching in its ideas and implications, and returned Rinsch to the sci-fi projects that he had wished to begin his career with. These self-funded shorts were filmed in Kenya, to avoid American labour laws, and Rinsch was a demanding presence on set, at one point filming for 24 hours straight. But when he had six short episodes ready, studios sat up and took notice.
It helped that Rinsch's work coincided with the mid-2010s boom in streaming content, and there was competition between several of the biggest services, including Amazon Prime and Netflix, to take Rinsch's shorts and turn them into a big-budget series. Eventually, Netflix prevailed, after Amazon believed they had reached an informal agreement, and, at the end of 2018, Rinsch and Rosés signed an enviable deal.
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A post shared by Gabriela Rosés Bentancor (@gabyroses)
For a 13-episode series of short films, totalling between 110 and 120 minutes in length, they would be commissioned to make the series with a cost of over $60 million, under the name Conquest or 'White House', complete with Reeves as an investor. It attracted a well-known cast, including British actress Harriet Walter, and would, had matters gone well, given Rinsch a second chance at an A-list career. He was given final cut, and he and Rosés were 'locked for life' into any sequels or spin-off opportunities. Lest we forget, this was also a time when short-form filmmaking was believed to be the future of streaming content; Jeffrey Katzenberg's now-defunct Quibi had just launched to great fanfare.
Unfortunately, matters did not go well. Netflix, for unfathomable reasons, chose to ignore Rinsch's various eccentricities, which included his failing to have completed scripts for the remaining episodes. He instead suggested that he had thought up the entire story in his head, and he would communicate this information to the actors, crew and special effects department as and when it was required.
Not a single further episode was completed, despite filming in locations that included Budapest, São Paulo and Montevideo. A well-sourced 2023 piece from the New York Times suggested that 'He claimed to have discovered Covid-19's secret transmission mechanism and to be able to predict lightning strikes.'
The director had to make an outright denial that he had mental health issues, saying in an Instagram post that the Times article would 'discuss the fact that I somehow lost my mind … (Spoiler alert) … I did not.' His marriage collapsed, amidst allegations that he had punched holes in walls and had accused Rosés of hiring a hitman to kill him. And Netflix, bizarrely, kept on sending Rinsch more and more money to finish the show, eventually taking their outlay to $55 million: only $6 million less than the sum originally agreed.
By the time that Rosés went to the streaming company to inform them that her soon-to-be-ex husband was doing a credible impersonation of Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse now, Netflix realised that they had wasted their money. They accordingly pulled the plug on the project, announcing that 'after a lot of time and effort, it became clear that Mr. Rinsch was never going to complete the project he agreed to make, and so we wrote the project off.'
When they asked for the money to be returned, he refused to do so, claiming instead that the millions of dollars spent on cars and furniture were production expenses for the series, and that the money that he had made out of his investments ('Thank you and god bless crypto,' he was said to have remarked online after making $27 from the cryptocurrency Dogecoin) were a result of his financial acuity, rather than the company's misspent investment.
This will now be for the courts to decide. Certainly, it seems unlikely that Conquest, White House or whatever it should have been called will ever see the light of day, and Netflix's investment, whether in whole or part, looks equally unlikely to be recovered. Nonetheless, Rinsch's arrest and indictment mean that this fascinating insight into what really goes on behind the scenes at some of the industry's biggest streaming companies – and how its unfettered talent behaves – will only become more compelling as time goes on.
The streaming films we'll never see
The Mothership
This Halle Berry sci-fi picture, announced as part of a multiple Netflix film deal with the actress in 2020, was completed in 2021, but was said to require 'significant' reshoots in order to render it releasable. After sitting on it until 2024, and apparently being confused by the idea that the child actors in the film would have aged, thus making these reshoots difficult, Netflix simply announced that The Mothership would be cancelled altogether. As a sweetener, Berry's film The Union, with Mark Wahlberg, was released by the streaming company last summer, to an indifferent reception.
Batgirl
Warner Brothers' CEO David Zaslav is not one of the most popular men in Hollywood, and amidst the myriad reasons for this, his decision to scrap several of their pictures and write their cost off against tax was seen as a triumph of bean-counting over creativity. The highest-profile example of this was the already completed Batgirl, which would have starred Leslie Grace as the eponymous heroine alongside superhero veterans Michael Keaton and J.K Simmons and newly Oscar-winning Brendan Fraser as the baddie, to be directed by Bad Boys filmmakers Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah. Described by anonymous sources as 'a huge disappointment' and cheap-looking, the decision simply to can the film altogether was still regarded as unprecedented, and a potential indicator of worrying developments to come in the industry.
Paris Paramount
Nancy Meyers, esteemed director of The Holiday and Something's Gotta Give, may well be the queen of aspirationally designed Hollywood rom-coms but her planned next foray into the genre, the Michael Fassbender-Scarlett Johansson-starring Paris Paramount, was canned after the already extravagant $130 million budget – with a considerable amount already invested in pre-production – looked as if it would rise upwards to $150 million, at Meyers' behest. While it would have been intriguing to see Hollywood's most intense leading man in a light-hearted rom-com, alas we shall never get the opportunity.