Aretha Franklin's immediate family is upset it had no involvement in Genius: Aretha

Los Angeles Times

Franklin's family has made their displeasure known publicly. Earlier this month, Franklin’s granddaughter, Grace Franklin, posted a TikTok video accusing the Genius team of refusing to involve her family in the third season of the show. And over the weekend, Rolling Stone published an interview with Franklin’s son, Kecalf Franklin, backing daughter Grace Franklin’s sentiments about the project. “As the immediate family, we feel it’s important to be involved with any biopic of my grandma’s life, as it’s hard to get any accurate depiction of anyone’s life without speaking to the ones closest to them,” 15-year-old Grace Franklin said on TikTok, where her family and friends can be seen chanting, “This movie has to go!” in protest of the series. National Geographic told the Los Angeles Times it obtained approval to move forward with the program from Aretha Franklin’s estate, formerly represented by Kecalf Franklin’s cousin, Sabrina Garrett-Owens, and not affiliated with Franklin’s immediate family. But The Times reports that when Garrett-Owens resigned about a year ago, however, the “Genius” team dismissed the rest of the family’s attempts to make contact, according to Kecalf Franklin. “We had our lawyers reach out to them and see if we could have some type of input and see the film and say what we like and what we didn’t like about it,” Kecalf Franklin told Rolling Stone. “And the report that we got back was saying that ... production had already wrapped up and that they didn’t want to work with us. It was basically too late.”