Arclight Films announced on Wednesday that Deep Water, a disaster film centered around a jet that crashes into the ocean while on its way to Beijing, has been put on hold due to its similarities to the missing Malaysian airliner.
“We’re delaying it out of respect for what’s going on,” said managing director Gary Hamilton. “It’s a pretty tragic event.”
Hamilton played down the similarities, saying that the “movie is not actually the same, it just deals with a plane crash.”
Deep Water is a film about a flight from Sydney to Beijing that crashes into the ocean, leaving an air marshal and a few surviving passengers and crew to fight off tiger sharks and other dangers.
The film is a loose follow up to the 2012 film Bait, a film about a shark terrorizing shoppers in an Australian supermarket flooded by a tsunami.
According to a report from Australian publication Inside Film, government film agency Screen Australia was funding Deep Water, which was to be co-produced with China with a budget of $25 million.
An international search effort has been scouring a remote section of the southern Indian Ocean for a Malaysia Airlines jet that disappeared March 8 on its way from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. Malaysian officials have stated that the jet likely crashed into the sea, taking the lives of all 239 people on board.
