By Phoebe Pang
Queen of Pop Madonna had her long-rumoured biopic shelved a few years ago, and she finally shed light this week on the reason it never completed production.
Madonna recently spoke to Interview magazine, addressing the stalled project for the first time and saying it was scrapped because she and Universal Pictures were at loggerheads over its budget.
Two years of work
In 2021, Universal won a bidding war against rival studios to produce the biopic. The plan was to have Madonna write and co-direct the film.
Soon afterwards, Julia Garner, known to the public for her award-winning role in Ozark, was selected after a publicised search.
The superstar, according to a snippet of the interview published on the magazine’s social media accounts, spent two years writing the script. Then, she spent the next two years negotiating its budget and other key casting decisions with Universal’s line producers.
For Madonna, the film never came to fruition because Universal could not agree to the scope of the biopic that she envisioned.
“I was supposed to make a movie about my life,” she confessed in the interview.
“I worked on my script for two years and spent two years at Universal Studios with the line producers doing budgeting and casting.”
A trust issue, not just a money issue
One anecdote from the interview Madonna shared is that she suggested filming in Serbia as a way of reducing the costs of the project, but the studio shot her down.
According to Madonna, they said that they thought she wouldn’t be able to stay in the country for more than four days, a judgment she shut down with conviction.
“Did you read the script? My whole life has been survival. I’m not going there for holiday,” she shot back.
This suggests that the friction was a matter of whether the studio respected her say in her own narrative more than just dollars and cents.
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A bungled attempt with Netflix
But after Universal dropped the movie, another outlet threw its hat in the ring.
Netflix decided that a movie simply wouldn’t do – they wanted to turn Madonna’s life into a series instead, with Shawn Levy of the Emmy-winning show “Stranger Things” on board as executive producer.
There was just one small problem as the rights to the script were still owned by Universal. Madonna wanted to use the script she had already written but acquiring the rights would have cost “an extortionist’s price”, she claimed.
The fight between her and the studio stalled the project for a reported eight or nine months.
While actress Julia Garner has reportedly been approached for the role in Netflix’s version, her involvement has not been confirmed.
The project is currently in the development stage at the streaming giant, and no premiere date has been announced.
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Jheruleene Anne Ramos