Wicked director Jon M. Chu issues Britney Spears biopic update
“I’ve seen all fan castings, and I always take those into consideration because maybe there’s a good idea out there"
By Gary Grimes
Wicked director Jon M. Chu has excited Britney Spears fans everywhere with an update on the upcoming biopic on the star he is set to direct, telling Entertainment Tonight: “She’s going to be very involved.”
Chu, whose blockbuster adaptation of Wicked picked up the cinematic and box office achievement award at the recent Golden Globe Awards, revealed that work on the project has yet to really begin. “I haven’t really started anything fully yet, but she will be very involved in this. I have ideas and things, an approach, but it’s very early.”
“I’ve seen all fan castings, and I always take those into consideration because maybe there’s a good idea out there,” Chu said. “But we’ll have to see what the approach of the movie is before we know who’s right for it.”
The film will be an adaptation of of Spears’ bestselling 2023 memoir The Woman In Me. “I’ve been a fan since I was young, and she was young, and she was one of 12 acts at the Shrine Auditorium,” Chu went on. “So I want to do her justice and tell her story right. But we’ll see. We’re developing it now, and it’s a long road ahead.”
Spears first acknowledged the project last year posting on X that producer Marc Platt would also be involved. “Excited to share with my fans that I’ve been working on a secret project with #MarcPlatt,” the ‘Stronger’ singer wrote. “He’s always made my favorite movies.” Platt has previously worked on such films as Legally Blonde, Josie and the Pussycats and La La Land.
She later posted on Instagram revealing a little more about what shape the film might take, writing it was “flattering to be in such good company like Jon Chu,” adding that “the project I might be doing isn’t a biopic story … it’s a fictional musical where I play an extremely intelligent character !!!”
In a separate interview with The Hollywood Reporter in November Chu added: “She represents a generation of people growing up in the 2000s and late ’90s, and she has a story that deserves to be told properly. There’s a lot about us in it.”
He also noted that “we haven’t written the script yet, we haven’t hired a writer yet. But in this initial conception, I think it’s a lot about how we treat people, young people, stars that we think we own, women, mothers.”