Madonna has finally revealed why her long-anticipated biopic never made it to the screen, and it comes down to a budget dispute with Universal Pictures that ultimately killed the project entirely.
Speaking to Interview magazine, the pop icon explained that after two years of script development and two more years of pre-production work with Universal’s line producers on budgeting and casting, the whole thing collapsed over 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, she added, simply could not get their heads around the scale of what was required.
In an attempt to salvage the project, Madonna explored filming in Serbia as a way to bring costs down, but that proposal was met with scepticism rather than enthusiasm.
“One of their first reactions was, ‘We don’t believe you’d stay in Serbia more than four days,'” she recalled. “And I said, ‘Did you read the script? My whole life has been survival. I’m not going there for a holiday.'”
She suggested the studio may simply have lacked faith in the vision altogether. “Maybe they just didn’t believe in me.”
When the Universal deal fell apart, Netflix approached her about developing the story as a series instead.
That process proved equally frustrating. She could not use the script she had written with Universal without buying it back at what she described as “an extortionist’s price, even though I wrote it.”
Starting from scratch with the streamer meant finding a showrunner, a search that dragged on for another eight or nine months without resolution.
“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.'”
Universal had won a competitive multi-studio auction in 2021 to make the film, with Madonna set to co-write and direct.
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 traced Madonna’s journey from her Michigan roots through her artistic emergence in 1980s New York, up to the 1998 release of Ray of Light.
A Netflix autobiographical series is still in development via Shawn Levy’s deal with the streamer, though Garner is not attached to that version.
The story does, however, live on in a fictional form, Madonna and Garner filmed together at the Venice Film Festival for Season 2 of Seth Rogen’s Apple TV+ comedy The Studio, in which a Madonna biopic starring Garner features as a storyline.
