Australian Thriller Canceled Due To Similarities To Malaysia Airlines Flight 370

The tragedy of the missing Malaysian flight over the Indian Ocean has wracked the brains of all involved and chilled the bones of all spectators. Passions have erupted over what the cause of the crash might be, but to most onlookers it certainly appears as if a major flight simply disappeared. Ultimately, not knowing can be scarier than the worst kind of truth. The last thing any friends and family members of the passengers need is life echoing art.

Which is why Arclight Films is putting a stop to Deep Water 3D, according to THR. The $25 million horror adventure film finds a flight from Australia to China crashing into the Pacific Ocean, its passengers having to deal with deadly shark attacks. The tagline for the film, which hadn’t started filming yet, said, "Survivors of a plane crash face terror beyond reckoning as the plane is starting to sink into a bottomless abyss and soon discover they're surrounded by the deadliest natural born killers on earth."

The project apparently started out as the sequel to the film Bait 3D, which gained a brief theatrical release in 2011. That film, a Renny Harlin-produced actioner, found a group of survivors holed up during a tsunami inside a flooded supermarket, dealing with a group of flesh-eating sharks. That project shared several cast and crew members from the James Cameron-produced Sanctum, which was a major 3D release in America that you probably don’t at all remember. The same team was reuniting for this new effort, which would have been pitched heavily to the Chinese market that surprisingly made Bait 3D such a hit in that region.

Also feeling the heat from the unfortunate tragedy is Last Flight, a Chinese 3D action film with Ed Westwck (!) and Zhu Zhu that takes place onboard a troubled flight. The marketing campaign has been largely muted, with a few glitzy premieres for the film canceled altogether. Meanwhile, Arclight Films will attempt to move completely away from tragedy with a science fiction adaptation of Heart Of Darkness. It’s unclear if this project has anything to do with Peter Cornwell’s In Darkness, a previously-announced sci-fi version of Joseph Conrad’s work. This Deep Water is not at all related to the 2006 documentary of the same name, detailing the first-ever round-the-world boat race. You can catch the trailer to the doc below. The hope is that this saga will end soon, and the truth about Flight 370 will be revealed.