30,000 feet above the fruited plain is not the place to catch the raciest new fare from Hollywood…unless you own your own plane, of course. Then you can watch and/or do whatever you want. But for the most part, airlines from American to Xanadu have shown movies onboard that can be viewed by everyone, keeping things mainly within what might be considered family fare. This is not absolute, of course. JetBlue’s 21 gazillion channels of DirectTV provide the opportunity to poke that annoying little armrest button long enough to find, say The Terminator gunning people down while you fly. But for the most part when it comes to the movies being shown aboard movies that were actually selected by the airline, they have been tame.
According to sister-site Cinematical, that may not be the case any longer. Some airlines, they say, are beginning to show more racy, mainstream fare like Brokeback Mountain and Transamerica with the idea that this will provide more choice, variety, and current releases to passengers. I for one think i’s a good if not great idea, so long as they don’t begging showing Debbie Does Dallas or something. The fact is, given the lousy crop of films out these days, the more variety the better so as to tolerate those six or so long hours in the air.