KUALA LUMPUR, March 28 — Two professions not waiting for investigators to find missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370: Lawyers and filmmakers.
Just days after a Chicago, US law firm filed the first in an expected deluge of lawsuits over the jetliner that went missing on March 8 with 239 people on board, entertainment website Hollywood Reporter said that Hollywood studios are already gearing up for “several” movies on the ongoing tragedy.
While it said no formal bid has yet been made, the gossip new site wrote of a frenzy of activity behind the scenes in preparation for productions based on the “unprecedented” aviation mystery.
“It's a shocking tragedy, but even so, I guarantee there are 50 different people working on 50 different projects that are either inspired by it or based directly on it right now,” JC Spink, an executive producer on the 2005 airline thriller Red Eye, told Hollywood Reporter.
And while investigators have been struggling with the baffling circumstances surrounding the doomed flight of the Boeing 777-200ER, Spink said this was an ingredient that could make for blockbuster success.
“Clearly something more happened on that flight than we'll ever know. And that's a great jumping-off point.”
Disaster is popular fodder for the Hollywood machine; it made movies on the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks that involved four hijacked planes, “World Trade Centre” by Oliver Stone and “United 93” by Paul Greengrass among them.
One of the highest-grossing Hollywood films ever was also based on another transportation tragedy. James Cameron’s 1997 hit “Titanic”, a fictionalised retelling of ill-fated ship’s first and last voyage, raked in a total of over US$2 billion (RM6.6 billion) and held on to the top spot for over a decade.
One Hollywood producer said, however, that the continued uncertainty in the case of MH370 meant that a later discovery could derail any potential storyline based on existing information.
“They say truth is stranger than fiction, and this story is so bizarre. No one knows what happened ― or maybe people do, and they're not saying what happened,” Alex Heineman was quoted as saying in the report.
“I wouldn't chase a story like this ― a true-life disaster story ― because it's sad, and I don't want to be exploiting that kind of situation,” Heineman added.
Beyond the Hollywood limelight, MH370 is already the subject of a legal petition filed by a US-based Ribbeck Law on the behalf of Indonesian Januari Siregar, whose nephew Firman Chandra Siregar was a passenger on the plane.
Chicago-based firm Ribbeck Law told The Malay Mail Online that it currently has “several” clients in the lawsuit over the MH370 disaster and expects to represent the families of more than half of the 227 passengers on board the flight, but declined to reveal the nationalities of their clients.
Investigators are still struggling to explain what happened on board MH370 that caused it to divert from its flight to Beijing on March 8, beyond concluding that it was due to “deliberate action”.
Malaysia later said it was focusing investigations on the crew and passengers, but no apparent leads have been reported.
The US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) also did not recover incriminating evidence from the hard drives and a flight simulator belonging to two pilots on Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, the New York Times reported citing anonymous sources.
The search for the plane that disappeared on March 8 while bound for Beijing with 239 on board is now converging on a remote location in the southern Indian Ocean 2,500km southwest of Perth, after Malaysia announced on Monday that satellite data showed the flight “ended somewhere” in the waters there.
The airlines told families of the plane’s passengers and crew that it “assumed beyond reasonable doubt” that the plane was lost with no survivors.
