'47 Ronin' director charged with $11 million fraud over doomed Netflix sci-fi series
Published on: 2025-10-16 08:30:40
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 proje
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