Passengers on a flight from Sydney to Tokyo were subjected to an unexpected screening of Daddio, which contains “sexual material and brief graphic nudity.” Qantas has apologised for the incident.
On an otherwise routine flight from Sydney to Tokyo, a technical problem with the plane meant that passengers couldn’t choose their own entertainment from the screens in front of them. Rather than make their customers sit through the journey in silence, the Qantas Airlines plane’s crew decided to put on a film that everyone could watch at the same time.
Unfortunately, the film they chose was the sexually explicit, R-rated indie drama, Daddio.
The film was later described on social media by one passenger as “40 minutes of penis and boobs.”
Another expressed their sympathy for the “poor kids and their parents” who were subjected to the movie; “you should’ve heard the audible gasps across the plane,” they added.
As passengers began to realise how inappropriate the movie was, they reportedly jabbed away at their seatback screens in an attempt to turn it off – but found that all the controls were locked.
Qantas Airlines has since apologised for the gaffe, which it said in a statement to The Guardian was “clearly not suitable to play for the whole flight and we sincerely apologise to customers for this experience.”
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The airline pointed out that when the crew realised their mistake, they turned it off and put on a “family-friendly movie for the rest of the flight.”
Exactly how Daddio was chosen is a mystery even to Qantas, which says it’s “reviewing how the movie was selected.”
Starring Dakota Johnson and Sean Penn, Daddio is a two-hander (stop sniggering at the back) in which a passenger (Johnson) is driven across Manhattan by a taxi driver (Penn). On the way, the passenger reveals some of her innermost – and by the sounds of it, sauciest – secrets. Written and directed by Christy Hall, the film premiered at Telluride in 2023 before getting a limited US cinema release in June.
Daddio’s impromptu screening on a Qantas flight could prove to be the kind of viral marketing a relatively small indie film can’t ordinarily buy; one passenger commented that, when they saw Dakota Johnson’s face materialise on their screen, they “really thought they were playing Madame Web or something – I honestly don’t know if that would’ve been worse.”
We know which we’d choose – and it isn’t Madame Web.
