Director of scrapped Prince documentary calls cancellation “a joke”

A documentary on Prince would be a bonafide hit, there’s zero doubt about that. But his estate won’t even let it see the light, as they took an axe to the project just last month after reviewing it. Now, its director, Ezra Edelman, has a bleak outlook as to where it is metaphorically ending up.

As Edelman recently put it, “The image I’ve had in my head is the last shot of Raiders of the Lost Ark: of just a huge warehouse somewhere in Netflix, a crate just, like, put away.” The agreement between Edleman & Netflix and Prince’s estate over the documentary was that they would have full creative control but that the doc would still be screened for the Prince estate ahead of its release to ensure there was full accuracy.

This is pretty much where the nine-hour Prince documentary fell apart. As Edelman continued, “It’s a joke. The estate had — here’s the one thing they were allowed to do: Check the film for factual inaccuracies. Guess what? They came back with a 17-page document full of editorial issues — not factual issues. You think I have any interest in putting out a film that is factually inaccurate?…The lawyer who runs the estate essentially said he believed that this would do generational harm to Prince. In essence, that the portrayal of Prince in this film — what people learn about him — would deter younger viewers and fans, potentially, from loving Prince. They would be turned off.”

While Edelman’s documentary is scrapped, it has been announced that the estate of Prince will be moving forward with their own doc, which will no doubt have a clear skew in favor of The Purple One. Edelman pointed this to being a prime example of the sort of move that Prince himself wouldn’t tolerate, citing his battles with Warner Bros. That we won’t be seeing a more objective take on Prince is a shame. That we probably will never see the notes his estate gave Edelman and Netflix is also too bad, so we can only assume one was, “Not enough ping pong.”

Elsewhere on the Prince movie front, Ryan Coogler has a jukebox musical planned although there has been little news in quite some time.

What do you make of the Prince documentary getting canned? Are you hopeful for the new one from his estate?

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