While Antoine Fuqua and Lionsgate‘s crowd-pleasing Michael Jackson biopic is creeping toward the billion-dollar mark at the global box office. With that successful music world release of note, we’re still a bit perplexed why the long-gestating Madonna movie has, in contrast, been struggling to get into production, and the iconic pop star might have some new insight into the reason behind all those delays.
You might remember it started to finally look like things were coming together after Julia Garner was officially cast as the Material Girl, but how Madonna (who was co-writing with Oscar-winner Diablo Cody and later with Erin Cressida Wilson on the script) tells things while speaking with Interview Magazine, her working relationship with Universal seemingly eroded over time and led to those delays. Even though she was trying to get costs down and suggesting shooting it in Serbia to get the budget down to a workable number, the studio wasn’t sold on the idea.
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“I was supposed to make a movie about my life. I worked on my script for two years and spent two years at Universal Studios with the line producers doing budgeting and casting. We had a falling out, me and Universal, regarding budget because I needed—I’ve had an extraordinary life. I’ve had a huge life, so I needed a big budget. You know what I mean? It’s not going [to] be a—[indie]…No. They couldn’t get their heads around it. I found a way to make it for less money in Serbia, but I don’t think they were into the idea of—I don’t know. Maybe they just didn’t believe in me. One of their first reactions was, ‘We don’t believe you’d stay in Serbia more than four days.’ And I said, ‘Did you read the script?’ My whole life has been survival. I’m not going there for a holiday. But anyway, I was in limbo when that fell apart, and then Netflix reached out to make a series. That was a whole other long process, because I couldn’t use the script I had with Universal unless I bought it from them for an extortionist’s price, even though I wrote it. Don’t ask.”
She is also certainly grateful not to have moviemaking as her only gig due to the frustrations involved with the experience of trying to get the biopic together. “That’s just the way it goes. I started trying to understand how making a series would work. It’s a very, very different process. You have to meet a lot of writers and find the right showrunner, and I couldn’t find one. This went on for another eight or nine months. I was like, ‘Good thing I have another job because I need to work, I need to create. I need to do what I was put on this earth to do.'”
Madonna, of course, is no stranger to the movie world, having her biggest splash with the feature film iteration of the Oscar-nominated musical “Evita,” directing her own feature films (“Filth & Wisdom” and “W“), being married for a period of time to British filmmaker Guy Ritchie (they worked together on a remake of “Swept Away“), and having had a huge creative input on her decades-worth of music videos as well. She wouldn’t be talking out of school about how to budget the movie, having done this process in the past, so it’s a little odd that she was butting heads with the studio over costs.
What’s interesting here, after the likelihood of the movie happening is becoming less likely by the week, is that there is going to be a meta angle here as the Madonna biopic is going to be a story element in the second season of the Emmy-winning comedic industry series, “The Studio,” at Apple TV. There had also been word that Netflix and Shawn Levy were putting together a limited series, but we’ll see if anything happens with either small-screen or big-screen explorations of Madonna’s life.
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