Netflix has acquired a documentary film from Oscar nominee Rory Kennedy about the Boeing 737-Max airplanes and the crashes that led to the model being grounded, an individual with knowledge of the project told TheWrap.
The film comes from Imagine Documentaries, a division of Brian Grazer and Ron Howard’s Imagine Entertainment. Though it was originally conceived as a series, it will be presented on Netflix as a film at a later date.
Back in March 2019, officials grounded the Boeing 737-Max plane after two crashes within five months of each other killed 346 people, one in Oct. 28 on Lion Air and another on Ethiopian Airlines in March 2019. Investigators determined that an automatic flight control had caused both planes to nosedive and that training on the new system had been deleted from training manuals.
The untitled film from Kennedy and her producing partner Mark Bailey relies on first-person accounts and will explore the PR crisis that Boeing faced in the wake of media scrutiny after the crashes.
Kennedy is the director of the Oscar-nominated 2014 documentary “Last Days in Vietnam,” about the final days of the Vietnam War. She’s also the director of “Ghosts of Abu Ghraib.”
Imagine Documentaries debuted Ron Howard’s “Rebuilding Paradise” at Sundance earlier this year and also announced plans for another documentary to be directed by Howard about the humanitarian chef Jose Andrés.
News of the project was first reported by Variety.