'47 Ronin' director charged with $11 million fraud over doomed Netflix sci-fi series

Carl Erik Rinsch, the director of 47 Ronin, has been charged for defrauding a streaming service out of $11 million, according to the Southern District of New York's US Attorney's Office. While the court documents didn't name the service, an old report from The New York Times made it obvious that it was none other than Netflix. In 2018, Rinsch pitched a sci-fi series called White Horse, referencing the first horseman of the apocalypse, to several services, namely Amazon, Apple, HBO, Hulu, Netflix and YouTube. The Times' report said that Amazon had already won the bidding war, but Netflix's former VP of Original Content, Cindy Holland, called Rinsch on a weekend and offered millions more, along with the privilege of making a director's cut. 

In its announcement of the indictment, the US Attorney's Office explained that Netflix had paid $44 million for the development of White Horse, which had been renamed to Conquest, between 2018 and 2019. Some of that money went to paying off the project's earliest investors. (Keanu Reeves, the star of 47 Ronin, sank his own money into the project after Rinsch got in trouble with 30West, one of the project's first investors, for not reaching a deadline.) Between late 2019 and early 2020, Rinsch asked Netflix for more funding, and the company gave him $11 million more to complete the series. But Rinsch never finished the show, and Netflix accused him of using those funds to make "personal and speculative purchases of securities."

The director allegedly lost most of the $11 million to trading, but he made it back and earned more from investing the rest on cryptocurrency. Rinsch allegedly went on a shopping spree after that, spending almost $4 million on furniture and antiques, $2.4 million on five Rolls-Royces and one Ferrari, as well as $652,000 on luxury watches and clothing. The indictment also said that Rinsch spent over $1 million to sue Netflix for more money. According to The Times' report, Rinsch claimed in his lawsuit that Netflix broke its contract and owed him several more payments worth $14 million. In the midst of all of these, Rinsch reportedly displayed erratic behavior: He allegedly claimed to have discovered Covid-19’s secret transmission mechanism, treated the show's staff horribly and accused his wife of plotting his assassination.

Conquest was supposed to be about a genius who invented a human-like species called Organic Intelligent. These OIs are deployed to solve problems and provide humanitarian aid around the world, but they are, of course, not what they seem and are hiding a darker nature. Rinsch has been charged with one count of wire fraud and one count of money laundering, both of which carry a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison. He was also charged with five counts of engaging in monetary transactions in property derived from specified unlawful activity, each count carrying a maximum sentence of 10 years.

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