Madonna has finally revealed why her long-awaited biopic never made it to the big screen, and it comes down to a budget dispute with Universal Pictures that ultimately killed the project completely.
speaks to Interview magazinethe pop icon explained that after two years of script development and another two years of pre-production work with Universal’s line producers on budgeting and casting, it all broke down 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 couldn’t wrap its head around the scale of what was required.
In an attempt to save the project, Madonna explored filming in Serbia as a way to bring down costs, but that proposal was met with skepticism rather than enthusiasm.
“One of their first reactions was, ‘We don’t think you would stay in Serbia more than four days,'” she recalled. “And I said, ‘Have you read the script? My whole life has been survival. I’m not going there on vacation’.”
She suggested that the studio might simply have lacked faith in the vision. “Maybe they just didn’t believe 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 “a blackmailer’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 thought, ‘Good thing, I have another job because I have to work, I have to create. I have 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 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 after 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, to the 1998 release of Beam.
An autobiographical Netflix series is still in development via Shawn Levy’s deal with the streamer, though Garner is not attached to that version.
However, the story lives 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 studiowhere a Madonna biopic starring Garner is a story.
