Prince documentary filmmaker seethes over the scrapped Netflix project: ‘It’s a joke’

Ezra Edelman compares his nine-hour Prince documentary canceled by Netflix to Indiana Jones’ prized Ark of the Covenant: lost to the world.

“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,” Edelman, who won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature for 2016’s O.J.: Made in America, said Tuesday on the Pablo Torre Finds Out podcast.

The director made it clear that he’s a fan of “The Purple One,” who died in 2016, but he also wanted to show the “Little Red Corvette” singer’s “humanity.” The project, which featured interviews with more than 70 people and included descriptions of physical and mental abuse in his relationships, according to New York Times Magazine Deputy Editor Sasha Weiss, who is one of the few people to have seen the film.

“Like most Americans who grew up in the 1980s, I had an image of Prince emblazoned in my mind: wonderfully strange; a gender-bending, dreamy master of funk,” Weiss wrote in her article “The Prince We Never Knew” published in September 2024. “He flouted and floated above all categories and gave permission to generations of kids to do the same. Edelman’s film deepened those impressions, while at the same time removing Prince’s many veils. This creature of pure sex and mischief and silky ambiguity, I now saw, was also dark, vindictive and sad. This artist who liberated so many could be pathologically controlled and controlling. The film is sometimes uncomfortable to watch. But then, always, there is relief: the miracle of Prince’s music.”

When Edelman joined the project, the outlet reported, he was assured that he and the streamer would have final say on the content of the documentary, while Prince’s estate “could review the film for factual accuracy.”

Edelman claims that’s not what happened.

“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,” Edelman told Torre, who has also seen the film. “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,” Edelman continued. “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.”

Netflix and Prince’s estate released a joint statement last month with their reasoning: “The Prince Estate and Netflix have come to a mutual agreement that will allow the estate to develop and produce a new documentary featuring exclusive content from Prince’s archive. As a result, the Netflix documentary will not be released.”

Edelman said this fight is one that Prince would have had.

“This is reflective of Prince himself, who was notoriously one of the most famous control freaks in the history of artists. The irony being that Prince was somebody who fought for artistic freedom, who didn’t want to be held down by Warner Bros., who he believed was stifling his output,” Edelman said. “I’m not Prince, but I worked really hard making something, and now my art’s being stifled and thrown away.”

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The filmmaker truly believed he had created something fans would embrace, a candid picture of an iconic entertainer.

“I’m like, ‘This is a gift — a nine-hour treatment about an artist that was, by the way, f—ing brilliant.’ Everything about who you believe he is is in this movie. You get to bathe in his genius. And yet you also have to confront his humanity, which he, by the way, in some ways, was trapped in not being able to expose because he got trapped in his own myth about who he was to the world, and he had to maintain it.”

EW has reached out to Netflix for comment.