Qantas Apologizes for Forcing Entire Flight to Watch Sexually Explicit ‘Daddio’

The airline chalked up the Dakota Johnson/Sean Penn vehicle playing on every passenger's seatback screen to a technical error.

Ruben Ostlund’s next movie is titled “The Entertainment System Is Down.” It’ll concern itself with a long-haul flight where the passengers suddenly lose access to the TV and film options they could otherwise watch. Chaos, and madness, ensues.

Australian airline Qantas offered a little preview of that descent into the aeronautical abyss. According to a riveting Reddit thread (and confirmed by USA Today), a nine-and-a-half hour Qantas flight from Sydney to Tokyo in early October had a problem with its entertainment system whereby every single seatback screen had to show the same movie. Based on requests made by several passengers, the movie selected for the entire flight to watch in unison was “Daddio,” Christy Hall’s R-rated taxicab drama starring Dakota Johnson and Sean Penn. The film is sexually explicit and features profanity as well as graphic nudity. Exactly what’s usually shown to an entire flight’s passenger manifest, including a complement of kids.

Or not.

As the original Reddit poster put it, the film also featured “a lot of sexting – the kind where you could literally read the texts on screen without needing headphones. It took almost an hour of this before they switched to a more kid-friendly movie, but it was super uncomfortable for everyone, especially with families and kids onboard.”

In an especially Ostlund-like twist, it seems the entertainment system being down actually resulted in the flight being delayed for an hour before it finally decided to take off. Once “Daddio” was playing, the Redditor said it was “impossible to pause, dim, or turn it off.” When the in-flight movie meets the Ludovico Technique!

A spokesperson for Qantas told USA Today that the crew tried to fix the issue once in flight, but after an hour of “Daddio” had unspooled and the problem seemed unfixable, they switched to a children’s movie instead.

“Our cabin crew apologized to customers inflight, particularly those who had complained about the content,” the spokesperson said. “The movie was clearly not suitable to play for the whole flight and we sincerely apologize to customers for this experience.”

Apparently, the airline is also reviewing the specific process of how the movie was selected in the first place.