Pulling a finished series from the calendar days before launch is the kind of move streamers hate making in public—messy, expensive, and impossible to spin as anything but damage control. But that’s where Apple landed late last year with “The Hunt,” the French thriller known in France as “Traqués,” after plagiarism claims forced producer Gaumont to open an internal investigation and Apple to yank the show from its slate.
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Now the project is back—with a new date and new attribution. Apple TV has set the series to debut on March 4 after it was previously scheduled for December 3, 2025, and then abruptly pulled while the allegations were examined.
The core of the controversy centered on authorship and credit. The show had been billed as an original work from “creator” and director Cédric Anger, until reporting flagged plot similarities to Douglas Fairbairn’s 1973 novel “Shoot,” which was later adapted into a 1976 feature.
Per multiple reports, Gaumont’s review concluded the series is, in fact, based on Fairbairn’s book—prompting the company to secure the necessary rights and Apple to update its materials to reflect that the project is an adaptation rather than an original concept.
As a piece of clean procedural storytelling, the premise itself is straightforward and vicious: Benoît Magimel (“The Taste of Things”) plays Franck, who spends weekends hunting with longtime friends until one outing turns surreal and deadly when another group begins targeting them without explanation. After a confrontation leaves one man shot and the friends retaliate, they escape and keep quiet—only for Franck to return home and feel a new paranoia creeping in, as if the hunters are still watching, still tracking, and now hungry for revenge.
Magimel is joined by Mélanie Laurent as Franck’s wife, Krystel, alongside Damien Bonnard, Manuel Guillot, Cédric Appietto, and Frédéric Maranber in the ensemble.
The larger takeaway here isn’t just that Apple has a new date on the board. It’s that the streamer and Gaumont appear to be trying to put a hard line under the dispute by doing the simplest, most essential thing: properly crediting the source material before asking audiences to buy the “original” pitch. In an era where international series are aggressively acquired, packaged, and marketed across borders, this is also a reminder that provenance matters—and that “inspired by” and “based on” aren’t interchangeable when someone else’s work is sitting underneath the engine. Watch the new trailer below.
