Ezra Edelman’s nine-hour Netflix Prince documentary might have been canned, but the director is not going quietly. “I am after some catharsis, if not closure, to move on,” he tells the Pablo Torre Finds Out podcast, after objections from the Prince Estate about the content of his completed Netflix film eventually resulted in it being shelved.
The final nail in the coffin for Edelman’s documentary, The Book of Prince, came last month (February 2025). “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,” Netflix said in a statement sent to the Minnesota Star Tribune. “As a result, the Netflix documentary will not be released.”
As the news broke, the Prince Estate posted a short teaser video stating that “The Vault has been freed,” confirming that it now has full access to the late star’s legendary repository of archive audio and video recordings. Which is sort of ironic for Edelman, given that exactly the opposite is happening to his film.
“The image I've had in my head is the last shot of Raiders of the Lost Ark, of just a huge warehouse somewhere in Netflix, a crate and just like put away,” he says, mournfully. But Edelman is adamant that The Book of Prince is far from the hatchet job that has been suggested.
“I'm like, this is a gift, a nine-hour treatment about an artist that was, by the way, fucking brilliant,” he argues. “Everything about who you believe he is is in this movie. You get to bathe in his genius, and yet you also have to confront his humanity.”
That ‘humanity’ is seemingly what the Prince Estate had a problem with, but Edelman was not prepared to cede to its demands for changes.
“So the estate had… here's the one thing they were allowed to do: check the film for factual inaccuracies. Guess what? They came back with a 17-page document full of editorial issues, not factual issues. You think I have any interest in putting on a film that is factually accurate?”
Edelman frames his documentary as a quest to find out who Prince - a “shapeshifter” who spent his life cultivating an aura of mystique - really was.
“How did we get from a teenage virtuoso genius who was the youngest artist signed by Warner Brothers and given complete creative control to a guy who died of a drug overdose in an elevator in Paisley Park? In essence, died in a box within a box that he built himself?”
Edelman also refutes the idea that his film could do “generational harm” to Prince’s reputation and lead to him being - to put it bluntly - cancelled.
His belief is supported by his interviewer, Pablo Torre, who has seen the whole nine-hour cut. He says that, while he didn’t characterise himself as a fan going into the screening, he came away from it thinking that Prince was “one of the most impressive artists that has ever lived”.
On any forthcoming documentary that’s made in collaboration with the Prince Estate, meanwhile, Edelman’s view is clear.
“The issue is that now the estate is going to put out its own documentary, but that's not a documentary,” he argues. “It's going to be a hagiographic, like, propaganda love letter to Prince the artist. Are you going to learn anything about Prince? I doubt it. Are you going to learn anything dark about Prince? I doubt it. Anything complicating about Prince. I doubt it.”
