Iconic directors named David haven’t been having the best luck with the Netflix streaming service lately. David Lynch recently revealed that Snootworld, an animated movie he hopes to make, had been rejected by Netflix, and now David Cronenberg has said that his new film The Shrouds – which just made its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival (you can read some of the first reactions HERE) – was originally intended to be a Netflix TV series, but the streamer dropped it after paying him to write the pilot episode.

During a press conference at Cannes, Cronenberg said (according to The Hollywood Reporter) that he “envisioned the story working well as a series. He flew to Los Angeles to speak with two Netflix execs who financed the writing of a first episode – which they loved. But after the second, they did not want to go any further.” Cronenberg went on to say, “They said – and this is a very Hollywood thing to say – ‘It’s not what we fell in love with in the room.’ Later, I felt that what they fell in love with in the room was me, which was very flattering, but not the script. I felt I can’t let this die, let’s see if we can turn it into a movie… It could be a series, but it doesn’t have to be.“

In The Shrouds, Vincent Cassel, who previously worked with Cronenberg on Eastern Promises and A Dangerous Method, takes on the role of Karsh, “an innovative businessman and grieving widower, who builds a novel device to connect with the dead inside a burial shroud. This burial tool installed at his own state-of-the-art though controversial cemetery allows him and his clients to watch their specific departed loved one decompose in real time. Karsh’s revolutionary business is on the verge of breaking into the international mainstream when several graves within his cemetery are vandalized and nearly destroyed, including that of his wife. While he struggles to uncover a clear motive for the attack, the mystery of who wrought this havoc, and why, drive him to reevaluate his business, marriage and fidelity to his late wife’s memory, as well as push him to new beginnings.”

Diane Kruger (National Treasure, Inglorious Basterds, In the Fade), Guy Pearce (Memento, The Hurt Locker), Sandrine Holt (Homeland, House of Cards), Al Sapienza (The Sopranos, Reacher), Elizabeth Saunders (From, Mary Kills People), and Jennifer Dale (Coroner, Into Invisible Light) are also in the cast.

Would you have been interested to watch David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds as a Netflix series? Share your thoughts on this one by leaving a comment below.

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