Britney Spears’ bestselling memoir The Woman in Me is headed to the big screen.
Universal has acquired the rights to the critically acclaimed memoir, released in October 2023, with Wicked director Jon M Chu to direct. La La Land producer Marc Platt, who worked with Chu on Wicked – due this fall – will produce.
Trade newsletter the Ankler, the first to report news of the project, puts the deal, which attracted interest from such figures as Shonda Rhimes, Margot Robbie and Brad Pitt’s Plan B, in the eight figures. Sony, Warner Bros, Fox, Disney and Netflix all reportedly vied for the rights.
The 42-year-old singer’s tell-all, which detailed her small-town Louisiana upbringing, her mega-stardom as a teenager, her mental breakdown and hounding by paparazzi, and the 13-year legal conservatorship that became a lightning rod for speculation and sympathy, topped bestseller charts last fall. It sold 2.5m copies in the US across hardcover, ebook and audiobook formats.
The audiobook, narrated by actor Michelle Williams with an introduction from Spears, became the fastest-selling edition in Simon & Schuster’s history, and Spotify’s No 1 audiobook of 2023. It also became the publisher’s bestselling hardcover nonfiction book of the year.
Spears’s memoir drew positive critical attention, as well. Reviewing it for the Guardian, Laura Snapes said the book “makes inarguable the ties between patriarchy and exploitation, and deserves to be read as a cautionary tale and an indictment, not a grab-bag of tabloid revelations”.
Spears appeared to confirm the news on her social media, teasing a “special project” with Marc Platt on X, formerly known as Twitter. “He’s always made my favorite movies … stay tuned,” she wrote with a rose emoji.
Spears was the subject of an unauthorized biopic on Lifetime, Britney Ever After, in 2017. She has previously dismissed ideas of an authorized version of her life, writing on social media in 2022: “I hear about people wanting to do movies about my life … dude I’m not dead!!!”
Spears is not the only pop star with big-screen treatment in development – a year and a half after the project was indefinitely halted, Madonna’s long-gestating biopic, also from Universal Pictures, is reportedly back on.
Chu, 44, previously directed 2018’s Crazy Rich Asians, which became the first major Hollywood studio movie to feature a majority-Asian cast in a modern setting since The Joy Luck Club in 1993. His other credits include the Lin-Manuel Miranda Broadway adaptation In the Heights, Step Up 2: The Streets, Justin Bieber: Never Say Never and Justin Bieber’s Believe.
He is also set to direct an adaptation of Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat for Amazon and an adaptation of Dr Seuss’s Oh, the Places You’ll Go! for Warner Bros Picture Animation.