Rude awakening: when movies change their original NSFW titles

Hit Netflix comedy A Family Affair and Zoe Kravitz’s upcoming thriller Blink Twice were both once called very different things

A Family Affair, currently one of the most-watched movies on Netflix, is like Amazon’s recent movie The Idea of You, only reconfigured to more explicitly serve a stereotypical audience of moms and their gen Z daughters. In it, writer Brooke Harwood (Nicole Kidman) unexpectedly falls in love with movie star Chris Cole (Zac Efron), 16 years her junior, much to the chagrin of Brooke’s 20-something daughter Zara (Joey King), who works as Chris’s beleaguered personal assistant. If Idea of You felt a bit like erotic fanfic, A Family Affair is more like a sitcom with some Nancy Meyers-style flattery thrown in. It has the mildest hint of sex – Zara catches Chris and Brooke mid-coitus, and Kidman shows off a little side boob – and its low-key cringes would withstand most parent-and-adult-child watches. It is rated, like seemingly most movies, PG-13.

So it’s a little surprising to read that the movie’s script, when Efron first read it, was originally titled Motherfucker. (Albeit, Efron claims, bleeped out.)