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.)
The movie formerly known as Motherfucker was written by Carrie Solomon; it’s her first credited screenplay, and she wouldn’t be the first writer to use an eye-catching NSFW (or NSFMP – Not Safe for Movie Poster) title that obviously wouldn’t survive the journey to the screen, even if every other aspect of the movie was perfectly and respectfully preserved. No Strings Attached, a 2011 romantic comedy starring Natalie Portman and Ashton Kutcher, was more bluntly called Fuck Buddies at the script stage, with one draft even opening with the characters debating whether or not they want to use that particular moniker to describe their casual-sex relationship. Last year’s raunchy road trip comedy Joy Ride supposedly punned on a seminal 1993 Asian-American family drama, for a working title of The Joy Fuck Club. Later this summer, Zoë Kravitz’s directorial debut Blink Twice will hit theaters sans its original title, Pussy Island.