A good movie can make a lengthy plane ride go by nice and quickly, but the selection stage is vital. If you pick something too slow, it hardly helps the time at all, and if you select something too action-packed or intense, it will fail to impress on those tiny airplane screens.
A plane full of engers had that particular decision stolen from them on a flight from Sydney to Tokyo in early October. Technical difficulties prompted the flight attendants to switch-up the usual approach — which sees individual travelers make their own entertainment selections — with unexpected results.
Whatever the technical glitch that caused it, engers on flight QF59 were ultimately left with no choice but to watch an R-rated Dakota Johnson release from 2023. The flight initially tried to keep the force-fed film under wraps, but the Washington Post uncovered that engers watched a good chunk of Daddio, a flick starring Johnson alongside Academy Award-winner Sean Penn.
It’s far from the worst Johnson-led option out there — can you imagine if those poor kids had been subjected to 50 Shades of Gray? — but there’s more than enough racy content packed into the film’s hour and a half runtime to scar some small eyes.
Daddio follows Johnson, an unnamed woman, as she enters a Manhattan cab following a flight. She and the cab’s driver, played by Penn, soon get to chatting, and gradually make their way through a range of topics, including “past and present relationships, sex and power dynamics, loss, and vulnerability.”
That R-rating doesn’t sound so bad when its just in conversation, but IMDB notes that “language throughout” isn’t the only element that makes the film inappropriate. Daddio also sports “sexual material and brief graphic nudity,” which sure as sugar makes the film deeply inappropriate for young engers.
The flight crew selected the film after a technical glitch made individual entertainment selections impossible. To ensure that engers still had entertainment for their flights, the crew took requests for which movie should play across the plane, and it seems Daddio won out. Once they realized how inappropriate it was for the younger engers on the plane, however, the crew quickly rectified the situation, and replaced it with a kid-friendly flick.
The airline quickly issued an apology, noting that “the movie was clearly not suitable to play for the whole flight, and we sincerely apologize to customers for this experience.” The airline went on to add that “all screens were changed to a family friendly movie for the rest of the flight, which is our standard practice for the rare cases where individual movie selection isn’t possible.”
And just like that, Qantas Airways accomplished the impossible. With one minor mistake, it managed something no one else on the planet has achieved so far: It made Madame Web the better viewing option. It’s insane, considering the film’s hilariously awful 11% Tomatometer score, but somehow, when faced with graphic sexting and full-frontal nudity, Qantas Airways discovered the one instance in which Madame Web would have been the Dakota Johnson movie of choice.
Published: Oct 11, 2024 09:15 am