Madonna has finally revealed why her long-awaited biopic never made it to the screen, and it all comes down to a budget dispute with Universal Pictures that ultimately killed the project entirely.
talking to Interview MagazineThe pop icon explained that after two years of script development and two more years of pre-production work with Universal’s line producers on budget and casting, everything fell apart because of money.
“I’ve had an extraordinary life. I’ve had a huge life, so I needed a big budget. You know what I mean?” she said.
Universal, he added, simply couldn’t understand the scale of what was required.
In an attempt to save the project, Madonna explored filming in Serbia as a way to cut costs, but that proposal was met with skepticism rather than enthusiasm.
“One of his first reactions was: ‘We don’t think he will stay in Serbia more than four days,'” he recalled. “And I said, ‘Did you read the script? My whole life has been survival. I’m not going there on vacation.'”
He suggested that the studio may simply not have had faith in the vision. “Maybe they just didn’t believe in me.”
When the deal with Universal fell through, Netflix approached her to develop the story as a series.
That process was equally frustrating. He couldn’t use the script he had written with Universal without buying it back at what he described as “a shakedown price, even though I wrote it.”
Starting from scratch with the streamer meant finding a showrunner, a search that lasted another eight or nine months without resolution.
“I thought, ‘Thank goodness I have another job because I need to work, I need to create. I need to do what I was born on this earth to do.'”
Universal had won a competitive multi-studio auction in 2021 to make the film, with Madonna co-writing and directing.
Several screenwriters, including Diablo Cody and Erin Cressida Wilson, worked on it over the years, and in 2022, Julia Garner was cast as Madonna following a high-profile audition process.
The film would have followed Madonna’s journey from her Michigan roots through her artistic emergence in 1980s New York, to the 1998 release of ray of light.
An autobiographical Netflix series is still in development through Shawn Levy’s deal with the streamer, although Garner is not attached to that version.
However, the story lives on in fictional form: Madonna and Garner filmed the second season of Seth Rogen’s Apple TV+ comedy together at the Venice Film Festival. The studyin which a Madonna biopic starring Garner appears as the plot.
