Netflix rightfully steps back from Prince documentary

Prince's legacy gets odd. Not only his personal life, but his music catalog as well. Few artists evolved in such an artistic and popular way. He began as a fringe artist and became a music icon, but by the end of his career, few of his albums sold exceedingly well. They might have been worth it, of course, but music buyers might also tend to go with what is new and what is hot.

Prince always deserved better. He was amazing at knowing how his music sounded and how to package it. But that did not mean a large amount of sales. He did things his way, and he had earned that right. He was a musical figure like few others. If you didn't love his music by the 1990s, he wasn't going to force you to do so. In many ways, he was the Tom Waits of pop and R&B.

Netflix was expecting to be able to produce a documentary about the icon. The streamer had worked with Ezra Edelman who was given an all-access pass to Prince's archives, known as The Valut, and Edelman had spent five years on the project. This was when a bank controlled Prince's estate (the performer passed away in 2016), and all things seemed to be going swimmingly.

Netflix's Prince documentary seems to be on the outs

Then things changed. The bank no longer controlled the estate in 2022, and instead, some of his heirs, associates, and a company called Primary Wave controlled everything. They seemingly did not like the direction the reported nine-hour Prince documentary was going to take. It wasn't going to be all about good music and good deeds, but Prince the human as well.

Perhaps the heirs and everyone thought some of what might be shown about the icon was going to be enhanced. Maybe not all of it was true, they must have thought, and why make a documentary about the performer if some of the more salacious material was hyperbole rather than fact?

Of course, maybe everything would have been referenced, none of it fabricated, and all of it true. The new overseers of Prince's estate were not OK with that. Instead, any future release date of the Netflix Prince doc was done and gone away with.

Now, Netflix and Prince's estate have come to an agreement that the estate will be in charge of producing and developing any documentary about the icon. Maybe Netflix made the right move. Still, one might wonder if what the estate turns out will be so white-washed that the doc will be boring and meaningless.

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