Filmmaker Ezra Edelman expressed his disappointment over his nine-hour Prince Netflix documentary on March 4 on the Pablo Torre Finds Out podcast. He compared the lost project to Indiana Jones’ prized Ark of the Covenant.
Edelman said, “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 is no stranger to the documentary scene, having won an Oscar for Best Documentary Feature for his 2016 “O.J.: Made in America.”
The filmmaker described the nixed Prince documentary as something that would have given an honest picture of an entertainer that most friends would have been excited to see.
Edelman wanted to make a documentary that showed the “Purple Rain” singer’s humanity following his death in 2016.
The documentary included over 70 interviews with people around Prince. As described by New York Times Magazine Deputy Editor Sasha Weiss, the project tackled some of the abuse that Prince suffered in his relationships during his rise to infamy.
Edelman seethed, “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.”
Weiss added, “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.”
“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.”
Edelman continued to explain what led to the Netflix documentary being pulled. He alleged that the Prince’s estate checked the film for factual inaccuracies and allegedly found a “17-page document full of editorial issues — not factual issues” instead.
“You think I have any interest in putting out a film that is factually inaccurate?” Edelman said.
As reported by Entertainment Weekly, Edelman articulated, “The lawyer who runs the estate essentially said he believed that this would do generational harm to Prince.”
Edelman said this whole ordeal is ironic considering Prince advocated for artistic freedom.
He said, “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. I’m not Prince, but I worked really hard making something, and now my art’s being stifled and thrown away.”
Prince’s estate and Netflix released a
joint statement to explain their reasoning for pulling Edelman’s documentary. The statement read, “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.”RELATED CONTENT: Prince To Receive Posthumous Lifetime Achievement Award At 2025 Grammys Alongside Frankie Beverly and Roxanne Shanté