Netflix's Blonde is expected to be one of the streamer's most controversial titles. The upcoming Marilyn Monroe drama that casts Ana de Armas as the Hollywood icon received an NC-17 rating from the Motion Picture Association for "sexual content", making it the first Netflix Original film to get the rare adults-only rating.
The movie's director Andrew Dominik has defended the mature rating, telling Screen Rant that “the NC-17 version of the Marilyn Monroe story” is what viewers want, but that doesn't mean that he was expecting the NC-17 rating. Speaking to Vulture, Dominik said that he thought he was playing in the R-rated territory when making the movie.
“I was surprised. Yeah. I thought we’d colored inside the lines,” Dominik said about Blonde's mature rating. “But I think if you’ve got a bunch of men and women in a boardroom talking about sexual behavior, maybe the men are going to be worried about what the women think. It’s just a weird time. It’s not like depictions of happy sexuality. It’s depictions of situations that are ambiguous. And Americans are really strange when it comes to sexual behavior, don’t you think? I don’t know why. They make more porn than anyone else in the world.”
When Vulture asked if Netflix is worried about the movie, the filmmaker said, “They’re paying $400 million for movies. A little $22 million movie, it’s not going to break the bank for Netflix. They just want to get their sort of marketing plan in order, I think, before they start rolling it out. Then we’ve got to work out how they want it to enter the world. It’s not going to come out ’til September. We shouldn’t even be talking about it. [Laughs] By the time ‘Blonde’ comes out, everyone’s going to be sick of talking about it.”
Although Netflix hasn't announced an official release date for Blonde yet, at least now we know that it will come out this September, as Dominik mentioned.
Dominik said that if Blonde had been released several years ago “it would have come out right when #MeToo hit and it would have been an expression of all that stuff. We’re in a time now, I think, where people are really uncertain about where any lines are. It’s a film that definitely has a morality about it. But it swims in very ambiguous waters because I don’t think it will be as cut-and-dried as people want to see it. There’s something in it to offend everyone.”
Blonde is expected to show up on the fall festival circuit. You can read everything we know about Netflix's Blonde here.
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