Airline Reportedly Forced Every Passenger To Watch An ‘Extremely Inappropriate’ R-Rated Film During Flight
A gritty exploration of an illicit affair, explicit photos and all, isn't exactly "all audiences" material!
Jaromir Chalabala | Shutterstock | Canva Pro Airplanes where all passengers share a single movie theater-like screen aren't all that common nowadays, but when they were the standard, you usually got something family-friendly — or at least PG-rated.
So imagine the surprise of a plane full of passengers on a 10-hour flight who were granted the experience of communally watching not something for all ages like, say, the latest Disney or Pixar fodder but rather a gritty psychosexual drama about a woman's steamy affair. Oops.
Australian airline Qantas has had to apologize after forcing every passenger to watch R-rated 'Daddio.'
"Daddio," director Christy Hall's debut feature, kind of came and went when it was released to theaters in 2023 despite being critically acclaimed. The film stars Sean Penn as a cab driver and Dakota Johnson as his passenger and chronicles the unlikely connection they develop during a trip from JFK airport to Manhattan.
Sounds like the kind of story everyone could get into — or at least fall asleep to on a 10-hour flight from Sydney to Tokyo, right?
Sure, maybe… that all depends on the TOPIC of said conversation, of course. And when it comes to "Daddio," the details of the convo are a lot more "Taxicab Confessions" than, say, "Driving Miss Daisy."
The film includes not only explicit text messages but also adult photos shared between Johnson's character and her boyfriend.
In the film, Penn and Johnson's characters discuss all manner of things, but the primary topic is Johnson's relationship with her married paramour, which they discuss in great detail.
Much of the story is shown through text messages in Johnson's character's phone between her and her beau — and yes, they're precisely the kind of text messages you're imagining, full of graphic language and even more graphic photos. Think of a common phrase that rhymes with, let's say, "tick picks" (this is a family website, okay?!).
Perhaps this was all an innocent mistake, but the film was rated R in the U.S., 18 in the U.K., and MA15+ in Australia, where film rating standards are quite a bit looser than the States — so you can imagine how this landed with the passengers onboard.
A passenger onboard was so incensed they posted to Reddit with details, including screenshots from the film itself showing just how explicit the text messages featured are, let alone the aforementioned "tick picks."
The passenger wrote that "the movie they played was extremely inappropriate" and it was "super uncomfortable for everyone, especially with families and kids onboard."
Qantas has apologized for the gaffe, which occurred because the in-flight entertainment system failed.
The passenger reported that the incident happened because the plane's individualized in-flight entertainment system failed, delaying the plane for an hour.
When they were unable to fix it, the pilot decided to depart anyway, and the only option was to play the same movie for everyone.
Worse, because of the crew's override of the system and its failure, passengers were unable to turn the film off or even dim the screen.
Worse still, "it took almost an hour of this before they switched to a more kid-friendly movie," the Reddit passenger reported.
Qantas has since issued an apology for the mix-up. In a statement, a Qantas spokesperson said, "The movie was clearly not suitable to play for the whole flight and we sincerely apologise to customers for this experience."
They added 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."
Here's hoping they make a different choice in the future. Maybe a nice cartoon, or episodes of "Great British Bake Off" — or pretty much anything besides a movie about explicit text messages!
John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer who covers pop culture, social justice, and human interest topics.