Airline apologizes for foisting unsolicited Daddio dick pic on innocent passengers

Oopsies! Qantas Airlines has been forced to apologize after subjecting an entire plane full of people to the Dakota Johnson/Sean Penn two-hander film Daddio. It’s charming to imagine the apology was prompted by the quality of the movie, which The A.V. Club gave a C grade. But no, passengers on the flight from Sydney, Australia to Tokyo, Japan were concerned not because the movie was “intriguing if altogether unsatisfying” (in the words of A.V. Club reviewer Manuel Betancourt), but because the R-rated movie film is decidedly inappropriate for certain audiences. 

The journey to Daddio—a journey that, surely, not many have taken—is a comedy of errors. According to The Guardian, the in-flight entertainment system was broken and not allowing people to select individual movies at their seats. So at the request of “some passengers,” as The Guardian puts it, the flight crew decided to play Daddio on every single screen in the plane. Why this consortium chose Daddio rather than literally any other movie that would’ve been both more appropriate and less obscure remains a mystery. But Daddio apparently played for almost an hour, and the entertainment system glitch reportedly meant that the passengers couldn’t turn their screens off, dim the lights, or do anything else to avoid scenes that include “brief graphic nudity” (as described by Daddio‘s MPAA rating) and explicit sexual text messages. That includes a dick pic and the NSFW (or plane) phrases “Help me cum” and “Cock so hard.”

Following the flight, a spokesperson for Quantas released a statement (via The Guardian) saying, “The movie was clearly not suitable to play for the whole flight and we sincerely apologize to customers for this experience. All screens were changed to a family-friendly movie for the rest of the flight, which is our standard practice for the rare cases where individual movie selection isn’t possible. We are reviewing how the movie was selected.”

Unfortunately, the switch to a family-friendly movie clearly came too late for the passengers who now have to have a conversation with their young kids about the dangers of sexting. A passenger cited by The Guardian who later posted about the experience on social media said there were “audible gasps” when the nudity appeared on screen. The passenger added, “[The film] was featuring Dakota Johnson and I really thought they were playing Madame Web or something—I honestly don’t know if that would’ve been worse.” Zing!