Back in November 2023, it was reported that a frenzied bidding war was in process to obtain the rights to adapt Britney Spears’s explosive, best-selling memoir The Woman in Me, with the likes of Margot Robbie, Reese Witherspoon, Shonda Rhimes, and Brad Pitt all apparently vying for the honor of bringing the pageturner to the big screen via their various production companies. Now, it seems, that battle is finally over: Universal Pictures has secured the project and Jon M. Chu, the director of Crazy Rich Asians, In The Heights, and the forthcoming Wicked movies is set to be in the director’s chair.
His involvement suggests that the new film could be a musical rather than a darker drama, as does the fact that the three-time-Oscar-nominated producer of La La Land, Marc Platt, is one of the industry heavyweights who is poised to develop the release. Spears herself previously hinted at the news, writing on X: “Excited to share with my fans that I’ve been working on a secret project with Marc Platt. He’s always made my favorite movies… stay tuned.” (Yes, fans will be reassured to know that the singer will be involved in the production, too, having worked tirelessly to reclaim a narrative that had been taken away from her decades ago.) Per Vanity Fair, she went with the Universal deal because it “was reportedly in the eight-figure range [and] likely because it also included rights to Spears’s own music catalogue.”
It’s not yet clear what time period the biopic will cover, though the book on which it’s based traces the Grammy winner’s life and career from her childhood in Louisiana and finding fame with The Mickey Mouse Club to the stratospheric heights of her pop superstardom, her highly publicized relationship with Justin Timberlake, the tabloid scrutiny which precipitated her fall, and the crushing lows of her conservatorship, before she emerged from it in 2021.
All of which to say, it’s a role that is sure to be life-changing for the starlet who ultimately lands it. Among the names being touted for the lead are Sydney Sweeney—honestly, who better to walk down school hallways in pigtails and a shirt tied at the navel crooning “Baby One More Time” than the Euphoria star?—but also Louisiana native Addison Rae, Dove Cameron (who, lest we forget, came within spitting distance of playing Wicked’s Glinda the Good Witch before Ariana Grande went on to snag the part), and Millie Bobby Brown, who, in 2022, told The Drew Barrymore Show: “I want to play a real person and I think, for me… [it] would be Britney Spears. Her story resonates with me. Just growing up in the public eye, watching her videos, watching interviews of her when she was younger… I don’t know her, but when I look at pictures of her, I feel like I could tell her story in the right way.”