Netflix's The Disciple Revisits Wu-Tang's $2 Million Album-as-Art Gamble

In 2015, Wu-Tang Clan sold the sole copy of Once Upon a Time in Shaolin at auction for a reported $2 million — and Netflix's new documentary The Disciple: A Wu-Tang Fable (2026) argues the stunt was a historic blunder. Directed by producer Joanna Natasegara and executive-produced by RZA, the film revisits the saga of the Staten Island group's attempt to sell music as a unique artwork.

The concept was a protest against piracy-era devaluation. "We'll make one single copy of the album, treat it like it's the Mona Lisa," RZA explains in the film. "It was a combination of ideas that led to it. Me and my student Cilvaringz — won't take all the credit."

The victory turned pyrrhic when the anonymous buyer was revealed as "pharma bro" Martin Shkreli. Resentment and division followed. Even Clan member Method Man turned on the project: "Fuck that album. … When music can't be music and y'all turning it into something else, fuck that. Give it to the people, if they want to hear the shit, let them have it. Give it away free." He softened his stance recently, after finally hearing the album.

What went wrong on the art-market side?

The band assumed art-world economics were simple. "Contemporary art is worth millions by virtue of its exclusivity," the group said at the time. In reality, a vanishingly small percentage of artworks of any era reach that price level, and the members' art references, judging by the film's quotes, run no further than Leonardo da Vinci, Picasso and Warhol.

The film notes one warning the art world could have given: in 2017, artist Richard Prince disavowed an artwork he had sold to Ivanka Trump — proof that sellers can come to regret who ends up owning their work. By then it was too late to warn RZA.

A long detour before the album returns

Structurally, the documentary stalls. After the opening sequence — where an unidentified interviewer calls the sale "one of the coolest stories in art history" — it drops the album for a full 55 minutes, tracing instead the life of Dutch-Moroccan rapper-producer Tarik Azzougarh, aka Cilvaringz, including his childhood experiences of racism and abuse.

Natasegara found him compelling. "Over a long lunch in beautiful Marrakech, where he lived, Tarik told me the twists and turns of the album's 30-year story, and I was fascinated," she said in press materials. "It wasn't only a great story; it resonated with me personally as someone who grew up in the '90s with mixed heritage."

On screen, Azzougarh proves less gripping. "I figured that a doc would show my side of the story," he tells the off-camera director early on.

The film then recounts how the teenage superfan flew to New York multiple times to ingratiate himself with the band, earned the name Cilvaringz, joined the Killa Beez (the extended Wu-Tang musician network), released records on their imprint and produced Clan albums.

The sale, the seizure, the second sale

The album was packaged in a custom handcrafted silver box and sold via online auctioneer Paddle8, with the stipulation that the buyer couldn't release it commercially for 88 years — listening parties were allowed. The band staged one such event at MoMA PS1, after which Complex praised a "rich, layered, and sonically bombastic" record, while ARTnews's Dan Duray noted "plenty of unexpected samples, melodramatic horns, cheesy bits of kung-fu dialogue."

After Shkreli's arrest, some of the film's funnier moments cover Wu-Tang's attempts to reverse the sale — including a rumored contract clause letting Clan members or Bill Murray legally steal the record back. Convicted of securities fraud and conspiracy in 2018, Shkreli forfeited the album, and the Department of Justice sold it for some $4 million in 2021 to crypto collective PleasrDAO.

"There's not a world in which we don't own this album," the group's late founder, Jamis Johnson, said in 2021. PleasrDAO has since staged listening events from Tasmania's Museum of Old and New Art to the Angel Orensanz Center in New York.

What does this change for the album now?

It's PleasrDAO's paradox to manage. "We don't want the record to be streamed," the collective's "chief pleasing officer," Adrian Johnson, told ARTnews. "The moment it is, it becomes another album."

"Everything about it is a paradox: it's for the people, but it's also highly guarded," he continued. "I don't believe that keeping it locked away is right. I also don't believe making it freely available is right. So we are constantly looking for creative ways to share this with the people."

Future activations will appear on a dedicated website, ouatis.art. Whether the documentary's passing-grade retelling revives public interest enough to matter is the question PleasrDAO will be watching next.