Aaliyah Movie Gets 3.2M Viewers As Lifetime Offers Full Movie To Watch On YouTube

The name “Aaliyah” is trending hard and heavy on November 17, with the Lifetime biopic about late singer Aaliyah Dana Haughton causing lots of controversy from start to finish.

The Hollywood Reporter notes that Aaliyah: The Princess of R&B pulled in 3.2 million viewers on its premiere, making it the second most watched Lifetime telepic this year. According to USA Today, Aaliyah movie executive producer Wendy Williams leaned on these ratings to clap back at all the haters on Twitter who’ve criticized everything from the Aaliyah movie actors to the non-original-Aaliyah music and more.

“I see my Aaliyah movie broke the Internet this weekend! Errbody got an opinion. Well, I must tell you, whether you loved or hate, you watched. It was the second-highest rated movie on all of cable this year so far.”

As reported by the Inquisitr, good friend and producer Timbaland was quite possibly the loudest critic of the movie that sought to chronicle Aaliyah’s rise to fame and her controversial marriage to Robert Kelly at a young age. Timbaland posted a series of critical memes on Instagram about the Aaliyah movie, ones that sought to inform Williams that he felt the movie somehow disrespected Aaliyah.

The Lifetime YouTube channel has the full Aaliyah movie posted in an hour and a half long full-length episode available for viewers for purchase, titled “Aaliyah: The Princess of R&B – Aaliyah: The Princess of R&B.”

A companion documentary video on Lifetime’s website, titled Beyond the Headlines: Aaliyah, received an average 2.7 million viewers, reports the Hollywood Reporter.

It’s unclear if critics of the Aaliyah movie are simply angry that the documentary doesn’t shy away from Aaliyah’s controversial marriage to the 28-year-old Robert Kelly when Aaliyah was a mere 15-year-old – and the fact that Kelly may have conspired with Aaliyah to fake the marriage documents, which are a matter of public record.

Based on the 2001 book titled Aaliyah: More Than a Woman by Christopher John Farley, the Aaliyah movie may have been widely panned by Aaliyah’s family and those who knew her well – prompting Zendaya Coleman to drop out of the lead role – however, there has been no word on whether or not those same loved ones of Aaliyah plan to release their own version of the singer’s life to set the record straight, over and above the ways they feel that Lifetime or Wendy Williams failed with this film.