Netflix announced on Thursday evening that it no longer intends to release Ezra Edelman’s nine-hour docuseries about the life of musical legend Prince—a project that has been described as a “cursed masterpiece” after it took the O.J.: Made in America creator five full years to make, only to run straight into the ire of the musician’s estate. Per Deadline, Netflix has pledged to never release the film, which it owns the rights to, in favor of a new deal to make an officially sanctioned documentary with the estate’s blessing.
Descriptions of the Edelman project (notably a September 2024 New York Times Magazine piece that describes the film in detail) have been glowing, with the few people who’ve been allowed to view it praising Edelman for building a complex, daunting portrait of a complex, daunting person, talking to dozens of people important to Prince’s life as part of a long, and very slow, process of painting a picture of a notoriously controlled public figure. (In an anecdote featured in the Times piece, Prince superfan and fellow documentarian Questlove describes needing a multi-hour therapy session after Edelman showed him the full film, saying “Everything’s here: He’s a genius, he’s majestical, he’s sexual, he’s flawed, he’s trash, he’s divine, he’s all those things. And, man. Wow.”) And now it’s getting dumped, with Netflix and the estate saying that “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.”
There’s an irony here to the fact that Edelman’s docuseries was Netflix’s idea in the first place: The streamer approached the director shortly after Made In America won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature, offering access to Prince’s famed vault—negotiated with the Minnesota bank serving as executor on the estate at the time—and final cut on the project. (The fabled vault material was reportedly less helpful than you might expect; like much of Prince’s public life, it was aggressively curated and edited by the man himself, forcing Edelman to look deeper to find his subject.) Changes in both the estate, and Netflix’s leadership, have steadily put the brakes on the project, even as Edelman has continued to work on completing it. Today’s announcement is, presumably, the fatal blow to the project.
