For music biopic fans, today's turning into a real doozy. Earlier, we learnt that Morgan Neville's bricks-and-beats LEGO Pharrell Williams movie Piece By Piece is set to close this year's London Film Festival in October. And now we're getting word via THR that Wicked director Jon M. Chu is set to turn his attention from one misunderstood girlboss with a banging set of pipes to another as he's signed on to direct a new Britney Spears biopic at Universal.
The studio behemoth fought off stiff competition to land the rights to the 'I'm A Slave 4 U' singer's 2023 memoir The Woman In Me, in which the American music icon offers a raw and unfiltered account of her life, career, mental health struggles, and the perils of child stardom. And whilst we don't know who'll be playing Britney in the movie just yet, we do know that Chu's Wicked producer Marc Platt is aboard to oversee this project — a creative choice Spears herself shared her excitement about in a post shared on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. Check it out below:
This new Britney biopic joins a recent years resurgence in movies based on music icons which has included the likes of Sam Taylor-Johnson's Back To Black, Reinaldo Marcus Green's Bob Marley: One Love, Elton John flight of fantasy Rocketman, and the upcoming Julia Garner starring Madonna pic Who's That Girl. And that's all not including Universal's other in the works music-based movies, namely their Snoop Dogg biopic (surely to be titled The Doggfather) and Ryan Coogler-produced Prince jukebox musical. Only time will tell however whether this new Spears movie will have us shouting "Gimme More!" or whether the whole endeavour will wind up turning a little bit Toxic. It does seem like fate though that the Crazy Rich Asians director is helming this one, though. After all, Britney did once famously sing "Chu want a piece of me?" Those were the lyrics, right? Right?