She wrote: “I’m told, by well-placed sources with knowledge of the deal, that the association has been disappointing all round, with Harry and Meghan drawing a relatively meagre amount from the streamer — thought to amount to as little as £16million ($20 million) for them personally, all in.”
The commentator noted that on Harry and Meghan’s new website, Sussex.com, there is no mention of Netflix anywhere and added that Hollywood’s expectation is that both parties will break the deal as soon as “contractually viable”.
The pair’s latest venture was to turn Carley Fortune’s best-selling romance novel Meet Me at the Lake into a Netflix film, however, Boshoff questioned whether its production would be possible by then.
The commentator went on to claim a source with knowledge of the situation branded the Netflix deal a “dead duck”.
The source said: “The whole arrangement was basically the trade-off for Netflix getting the Harry & Meghan documentary. It was never the huge payday that the Press reported. The £80million number was always a newspaper figure.”
They added the streaming giant is “annoyed” with the ever-changing cast of characters at Archewell – Harry and Meghan’s company and said: “There’s been a lot of turbulence at executive level within Archewell, and I know for a fact that Netflix are annoyed to be advancing several millions dollars a year of overhead to a company that can’t seem to retain more than a handful of staff at a time and that has almost no day-to-day visibility around town.
“That wasn’t what Netflix were pitched and the shaky executive base is a big part of the reason why Archewell hasn’t got much done.”
Last month, Harry and Meghan received another blow when Bennett Levine stepped down as production manager from Archewell.
The couple have lost five of their employees at Archewell in just over a year in total.
The source added that it was widely acknowledged that the streaming giant will want to either axe or scale down the deal with the Sussexes.
