When the coronavirus hit earlier this year, it occasioned several release date shifts for Disney. Most of them involved moving movie dates later, but one of them was the opposite: The movie version of Hamilton: An American Musical, which was announced earlier this year as a Disney theatrical release in October of 2021, was moved up by 15 months, and is to make its Disney+ debut on July 3. It had been feared that putting Hamilton on streaming services too early would cannibalize the movie’s theatrical business, but now, of course, there is no theatrical business.
Now, it had been assumed when Disney won the bidding war for the Hamilton movie that it would end up on Disney+ eventually. But then there’s the question of cursing and sexuality in the show. Disney has typically been keeping Disney+ family-friendly, while consigning more adult-oriented fare to its corporate sibling Hulu.
The Hamilton movie, which is based on the filming of a stage performance four years ago with the show’s original cast, will indeed stay on Disney+, but it will have some edits, creator Lin-Manuel Miranda said on Twitter this week.
“MPAA has a hard rule about language: more than 1 utterance of ‘Fuck’ is an automatic R rating. We have 3 ‘Fucks’ in our show,” he tweeted. “I literally gave two fucks so the kids could see it:
1. In Yorktown, there’s a mute over ‘I get the f___ back up again.’ 2. ‘Southern *record scratch*kin’ Democratic Republicans.’
You can sing whatEVER you like at home (even sync up the album)!”
That first one is part of a lightning-fast rap by Hercules Mulligan, in which the words are hard to understand, so it likely won’t be missed. “Southern motherfucking Democratic Republicans,” however, is one of the best lines in the show.
There are other “fucks” in Hamilton, however, including “That was my wife you decided to…” and “Sit down John you fat motherfuck.” Those, presumably, are the two “fucks” that Miranda allowed to remain in the show in order to avoid the R rating.
Miranda, in the thread, answered several questions, and assured his fans that “how does a bastard orphan son of a whore” remains the opening lines of the show.
The move of Hamilton was part of a lot of date shifting for Lin-Manuel Miranda projects this year. The movie version of his musical, In the Heights, was pushed back to mid-2021 from its planned date this summer, while his Hulu movie We Are Freestyle Love Supreme was pushed back, with about 24 hours notice, due to the George Floyd protests. It will now arrive in mid-July.
