A nine-hour Netflix documentary about the life and music of Prince directed by Oscar-winner Ezra Edelman has been successfully blocked by Prince’s estate.
In a statement to Variety, Netflix confirmed that Edelman’s documentary will not be released on the platform: “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,” the statement read. “As a result, the Netflix documentary will not be released.”
Edelman won an Oscar and an Emmy for his five-part 2016 docuseries OJ: Made in America, which examined the the life, football career, and murder trial of OJ Simpson. Edelman then began working on the Prince documentary, reportedly spending over four years on it after cutting a multimillion dollar deal with Netflix and Comerica Bank, the interim executor of Prince’s estate. Edelman was reportedly given unprecedented access to Prince’s archives, a.k.a. the Vault, and was promised that Prince’s estate would not exert editorial control over his documentary. Though his original deal was to make a six-hour series, Edelman reportedly emerged with a nine-hour doc about Prince—which Prince’s estate is reportedly using to withhold the doc.
According to a report by Sasha Weiss at The New York Times, Edelman’s documentary also included some of Prince’s ex-girlfriends accusing the musician of physical and emotional abuse. Per Weiss, who saw Edelman’s film, Prince’s former girlfriend Jill Jones alleges in it that the singer physically assaulted her. The project also highlighted Prince’s dependence on pain medication—he died of an accidental fentanyl overdose in 2016—as well as his abusive childhood and his abandonment of his young wife, Mayte Garcia, after the couple lost a child. Weiss wrote that Edelman’s Prince documentary was “a cursed masterpiece” that “shows, more movingly and convincingly than almost anything I’ve seen, how life can illuminate art, and yet how separate the two things really are.”
But it will never see the light of day. In 2022, Prince’s estate was divided in two: Prince Legacy, made up of Prince’s siblings and a couple of his former advisers, and the newer administrators of his estate, which include associates at the music-publishing company Primary Wave. According to Variety, the estate reportedly found Edelman’s initial cut to contain “dramatic” factual inaccuracies as well as “sensationalized” depictions of certain moments in his subject’s life. “We have a duty to honor and protect his legacy with a story that fairly shows his complexities as well as his greatness. #no9hourhitjob,” music producer Charles Spicer, a member of Prince Legacy, wrote on X in 2024.
After the announcement that Edelman’s documentary had been cancelled, Prince’s estate took to social media, posting, “The Vault has been freed.” Londell McMillan, a lawyer and a manager of Prince’s estate, called the decision to block Edelman’s documentary “a big, big win for Prince’s legacy.”
Vanity Fair has reached out to Edelman and Netflix.
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