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 twentysomething daughter Zara (Joey King), who works as Chris’s beleaguered personal assistant. If The 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.)
