This post contains spoilers for "We Have a Ghost."

Christopher Landon, the filmmaker behind movies like "Happy Death Day," "Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones," and "Freaky," has made the jump to the world of streaming with his newest film, "We Have a Ghost." The Netflix project is a family-friendly adventure about a family who moves into a creaky old house, only to get internet famous when they discover that it's haunted by a sad, silent ghost named Ernest, played by David Harbour.

As the film progresses, a disgraced CIA agent (Tig Notaro) learns of Ernest's existence and manages to capture him as a way to resurrect a scrapped, off-books agency program designed to study supernatural entities. In the current cut of the movie, the agent ultimately has a change of heart and lets the ghost loose, and Ernest commandeers a Lyft to take him back to the house to save the family. But an earlier draft of the movie featured a much more involved escape sequence — on that would have catapulted the budget to an unsustainable level.

'You Are Making This Way Too Expensive'

When I spoke with writer/director Christopher Landon about "We Have a Ghost," he mentioned there was a larger set piece he had written "that got cut out because there was no way we could afford to do it." When I asked him to describe that scene, he laid out what his plan was, and why Netflix made him cut it out of the movie:

"When Ernest escapes from the CIA, there was a giant chase set piece that had him leaping through the wall of a subway train, riding that, freaking everyone out, and people cheering when they see him in the subway, to him getting out of there and running through traffic. And he ran up a staircase and leaped through the third floor, a wall, flew through the air, landed through the roof of a Brinks truck, got chased by more cars in the Brinks truck. He threw the doors open, threw all the money out, had crowds of people running in … It was all this crazy s***. And Netflix was like, 'Yeah, no, you are making this way too expensive.'"

For many years, Netflix was seen as the studio where money almost didn't matter and big-name filmmakers could get astronomical budgets for eye-catching projects. But after the streamer's stock price took a major hit in 2022, causing ripple effects that significantly impacted the entire entertainment industry, Netflix's devil-may-care spending habits have evidently been curbed a bit. It remains to be seen how these harsh economic realities will affect upcoming productions, but we'll be here to document it as it happens.

"We Have a Ghost" is currently streaming on Netflix.

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