For all of the online hate that the controversial Netflix movie Emilia Pérez is getting — mind you, justifiably so — I’m starting to feel like many people haven’t sat down and actually watched the movie about a trans cartel gangster.
Because if more people had, in fact, watched the movie, it seems to me that we’d see much more complaining about something else infuriating related to Emilia Pérez that no one is talking about. Granted, this is a minor criticism compared to the litany of problems that people have with the movie, but here’s something else I couldn’t stand about it:
There’s almost two full minutes of production company credits and intro screens before you even see the first image in the film. Seriously, it’s like someone decided that hilarious Family Guy bit, which pokes fun at how ludicrous theaters have gotten with movie intros, needed to be normalized rather than made fun of. And so, here’s what you see after pressing play on Emilia Pérez — each one of the following names taking up a single screen, before fading into the next, one after the other:
- Veterans: A Goodfellas Company
- The 2024 Cannes Festival logo
- Pathé
- Saint Laurent Productions
- Canal+
- Page 114
- Why Not Productions
- Library Pictures International
- France TV Cinema
- Logical Content Ventures
- CNC
- Netflix presents
… and then, after all that, at around the 2-minute mark we finally see the first images of Emilia Pérez, one of the worst-reviewed Best Oscar nominees in recent memory.
The controversy has arisen, of course, not because of the over-long opening but because critics have collectively done that thing again where they collectively decide to celebrate performative garbage. That’s why the movie has a 72% critics’ score on Rotten Tomatoes, based on 258 reviews, as of this writing — and a ludicrously bad 17% audience score (based on more than 5,000 user ratings as of this writing).
Separate from all that, though, I really, really hope that the annoying amount of intro screens and production credits before Emilia Pérez even gets going doesn’t start to become more common at Netflix. This is one feature of the cinema experience the streaming giant definitely shouldn’t copy.
