Back in December 2017, Kenneth Branagh was fresh off his hit Agatha Christie adaptation, Murder on the Orient Express—which would accumulate more than $350 million worldwide—and already teasing a follow-up, Death on the Nile.

The sequel, Branagh suggested to the Associated Press, would be even sexier in theme—exploring primal emotions like “obsessive love and jealousy and sex” that make for a “very dangerous atmosphere.” Branagh’s inspirations for the sequel included the erotic thrillers Body Heat and Fatal Attraction: “These hot, lusty atmospheres,” he later explained to Empire. “People in the grip of extreme passions do do dangerous things.”

The new film seemed like an easy win. Death on the Nile would be another star-studded ensemble, adapted from a prestigious and already proven I.P. The follow-up would also be absent Johnny Depp, the problematic Murder on the Orient Express star whose late arrival for rehearsal earned him a dressing-down from Branagh, Insider reported in December 2020. His public divorce battle—Amber Heard claimed Depp physically and verbally abused her while under the influence of drugs and alcohol—also pulled headline focus. (Depp has denied all claims of abuse.)

The sequel would have a nearly doubled budget—a reported $90 million, compared to Murder on the Orient Express’s reported $55 million—allowing Branagh to recreate the 150-foot Abu Simbel temple complex. The production also built what Branagh described as “an absolutely enormous Karnak Nile steamer” that sat in “a massive water tank,” and digitally de-aged Branagh and his character, Poirot, for a flashback sequence set in World War I.

In the fall of 2018, it was reported that the film had settled on a new lead: the comparably clean-cut Armie Hammer, who had months earlier earned his first Golden Globe nomination for Call Me by Your Name. Hammer would play Simon Doyle, whom Christie described in her 1937 book as a “tall, broad-shouldered young man, with very dark blue eyes, crisply curling brown hair, a square chin, and a boyish, appealing, simple smile.” Doyle was a key figure—a character from a prominent family who operated with ease in moneyed social circles in spite of having no money himself. 

The role was an easy fit. The handsome actor had an illustrious pedigree as the great-grandson of Armand Hammer, the oil businessman who spent over $100 million to found the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. But, as Vanity Fair wrote last year, the family’s power and influence had dwindled in the generations since. Armie Hammer could seemingly relate to Simon’s paradoxical finances too: In spite of his last name, Hammer told a reporter in 2017 that he couldn’t afford to pay out a rather lavish bet he had made with Call Me by Your Name filmmaker Luca Guadagnino.

Death on the Nile began filming in fall 2019 in London, with Gal Gadot and Sex Education’s Emma Mackey rounding out the love triangle hinging on Hammer’s character. But Death on the Nile would become something of a cursed entity. First, Disney essentially halted production on the film, according to Variety, so that Branagh could do a “retooling” of Artemis Fowl. Had Branagh finished Death on the Nile first, Variety’s sources suggest, the murder mystery might have been released before the COVID pandemic struck—and before Hammer’s name would surface in haunting headlines that denoted the kind of sex, darkness, and danger Branagh associated with Death on the Nile.

As of May 2020, Hammer’s management and P.R. teams were still helping facilitate an upcoming segment on Good Morning America, where the cast would appear via Zoom to debut the trailer. The film had tested well in international territories, according to documents obtained by Vanity Fair, and the studio was considering bringing the cast to Europe and Australia for press if actors were willing to travel. (A three-day junket hosted on the Nile had even been discussed before the coronavirus pandemic scrapped travel plans.)

Come 2021, however, Hammer had more serious issues to deal with. After Hammer’s wife of 10 years, Elizabeth Chambers, filed for divorce from the actor, the anonymous @houseofeffie Instagram account posted screen grabs purported to be from Hammer and detailing extreme BDSM scenarios. The actor allegedly depicted a dark side of himself on his secret Instagram feed, posting about drugs and tied-up mannequins. Several women took to social media to accuse the actor of emotional abuse, manipulation, and violence.

In March, during a press conference attended by Gloria Allred, a woman named Effie claimed that Hammer “violently raped” her during a four-hour assault that she said took place in 2017. Hammer’s lawyer responded by saying that the actor “has maintained that all of his interactions with [her]—and every other sexual partner of his for that matter—have been completely consensual, discussed and agreed upon in advance, and mutually participatory.” (The Los Angeles Police Department opened an investigation into the rape accusation but has not, at the time of writing, brought any charges. A representative for the LAPD declined to comment to Vanity Fair.)

As the allegations gathered momentum, Hammer stepped away from two high-profile projects—a rom-com with Jennifer Lopez and a Paramount series about the making of The Godfather. His agency, WME, dropped him not long after that. Disney, meanwhile, waited to see what they should do with Death on the Nile in light of COVID and the complicated Hammer allegations.

In theory, Disney could have pulled a page from the Sony playbook—recasting Hammer with another actor. That’s what Ridley Scott famously did with All the Money in the World, replacing Kevin Spacey with Christopher Plummer after multiple accusations of sexual misconduct and assault against Spacey. (Spacey has denied the claims.) But because of Hammer’s prominence in the film, and the number of cast members he encountered in the project’s main story lines, his role could not have easily been reshot or recast. “Reshoots, after all, could cost tens of millions and would be nearly impossible to pull off given the packed schedules of the ensemble,” wrote Variety in 2021.

“Another option was to use digital technology to edit or alter the film, but that would have been equally as challenging considering the size of the cast and intricate story line,” added The Hollywood Reporter. “Ultimately, the studio decided to leave the film as is and proceed with a full-fledged theatrical release. To shelve Death on the Nile, or sell it off to a streamer, would have been a disservice to the large cast and crew, a source says.”

The studio had already released a trailer of the film prominently featuring Hammer—which included two cutaways to knives, a chilling reminder of the violent sexual scenarios described in the purported texts from Hammer. Toward the end of the film’s two-year pre-release purgatory—and after six release delays—the studio released a new trailer, minimizing Hammer’s role. Disney’s handling of the Hammer crisis has intrigued the internet so much that the new Death on the Nile trailer made news on Entertainment Weekly for “[trying] its best to downplay Armie Hammer.”

Regardless of how little he is featured in the trailer, though, Hammer still appears in about 75% of the film that reached theaters Friday. Which means that the studio still released a film that hinges on sex and darkness starring a romantic lead who has been accused of sex and darkness on a criminal scale. (Hammer checked himself into rehab last year, staying more than six months in a Florida facility to work on drug, alcohol, and sex issues.) Perhaps that is why the studio premiered the film the Friday before the Super Bowl, all but guaranteeing that it’s overshadowed by other entertainment headlines.

Believe it or not, Death on the Nile has other problematic cast members as well. Gal Gadot has been criticized for her statements about Israel and Palestine, and the film has been banned in Lebanon and Kuwait over her role in the film, per Deadline. Meanwhile, both Russell Brand and Letitia Wright have been scrutinized for other reasons—Brand for speaking out against vaccine mandates and Wright for questioning the legitimacy of the vaccine itself. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the studio did without a junket and most cast interviews. (Incredibly, Branagh, who has been doing months of press about Belfast—his personal drama that earned seven Oscar nominations last week—has somehow managed to skirt Death on the Nile–related questioning.) The disastrous nature of Death on the Nile’s release has been written up around the internet, including by the New York Post, which reported that the film was “every publicist’s worst nightmare.”

The studio is likely banking on return viewers who enjoyed Murder on the Orient Express—the kind who don’t get their celebrity news from @deuxmoi. For those aware of the Hammer allegations, though, the film has a surreal cast. “There’s a scene in Death on the Nile in which Armie Hammer aggressively kisses a woman’s neck, and I swear I thought he was gonna take a bite,” wrote one Twitter user, alluding to the actor’s alleged cannibalism kink. Los Angeles Times film critic Justin Chang describes the conundrum of watching the film, knowing the claims against Hammer and also that Death on the Nile’s “plot hinges in no small part on Simon’s sexual magnetism, the degree to which he pursues and manipulates—and is pursued and manipulated by—two equally ruthless women.” (Speaking to Vanity Fair last year, Vucekovich alleged that Hammer wooed her with love-bombing before introducing “manipulation and the darker stuff.”)

Writes Chang, “Some would doubtless prefer I glossed over that scandal, as if it were incidental or irrelevant to the movie’s quality.… Still, it seems odd to sidestep the issue of Hammer’s alleged misconduct when the film’s own distributor clearly regards it as more than a minor inconvenience.”  The Daily Beast’s Laura Bradley, meanwhile, put it this way: “If Kenneth Branagh’s Murder on the Orient Express felt a little queasy to watch thanks to Johnny Depp, the director’s follow-up, Death on the Nile, seems downright noxious.”

On Monday, it was reported that Death on the Nile topped the box office with $12.8 million in its first weekend—a subdued number compared to Murder on the Orient Express’s opening weekend of $28 million in 2017. But with moviegoers reluctant to return to theaters post-COVID, it’s impossible to gauge whether the cast’s P.R. toxicity played a part in Death on the Nile’s comparatively somber opening.

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