The Onion's Jeffrey Epstein film to screen publicly, despite distributor cold feet
The 20-minute doc Jeffrey Epstein: Bad Pedophile will premiere in independent theaters in Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Minneapolis, and Chicago.
They tried to bury The Onion, but they didn’t know it was a vegetable. On Thursday, The Onion CEO Ben Collins announced that the comedy outlet has been working on a groundbreaking new documentary called Jeffrey Epstein: Bad Pedophile. The film was supposed to premiere in theaters nationwide until the murder of Charlie Kirk. “Despite the fact that Charlie Kirk is not in this documentary, our distributor, a major national movie chain, got cold feet and pulled out,” Collins explained on Bluesky. “Jeffrey Epstein: Bad Pedophile had Donald Trump in it, so they were out.”
As Collins puts it, “I don’t think it’s good that we can’t make fun of the world’s biggest dead pedophile because he was friends with the president.” Determined to show the doc, which skewers Epstein, Trump, and the true crime genre as a whole, The Onion reached out to independent movie theaters and found several around the country who weren’t afraid of a little satire. The film will now open on October 2 in theaters in Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Minneapolis, and Chicago. (The 20-minute mockumentary will be followed by the first theatrical showing of The Onion‘s 2012 reality TV parody Sex House.) Collins also put out a call to other independent theaters, offering to screen Jeffrey Epstein: Bad Pedophile for free. “We’re now almost certainly going to lose money on it, but that’s not the point. We just want it out there,” he posted online.
Collins claims Jeffrey Epstein: Bad Pedolphile “is maybe the funniest thing we’ve ever done,” and championed independent outlets as a way to get art out there at a time of increased censorship. The Onion website has survived a lot—several years under the ownership of our shared former company G/O Media, for instance—so don’t think this latest attempt to silence the site will stop its intrepid staff from doing good work. “In the last year, we’ve been able to say a lot of stuff that other places are afraid to say,” Collins said in an interview with Wired. “We’re going to keep doing it.” You can check out the teaser trailer below.
