Madonna Says a Budget Fight With Universal Killed Her Biopic

The Madonna movie that Hollywood spent five years circling is dead, and the singer says the cause of death was a number on a spreadsheet. In a new interview, Madonna blamed a falling out with Universal Pictures over budget for sinking the biopic she had planned to co-write and direct.

"I was supposed to make a movie about my life. I worked on my script for two years and spent two years at Universal Studios with the line producers doing budgeting and casting," she told Interview magazine, in remarks tied to her new album, Confessions II. "We had a falling out, me and Universal, regarding budget because I needed -- I've had an extraordinary life. I've had a huge life, so I needed a big budget."

The project was, on paper, a sure thing. Universal won a multi-studio auction in 2021 for the rights to Madonna's story, with the singer attached to direct and co-write. Diablo Cody and Erin Cressida Wilson took turns on the script, and in 2022 "Ozark" Emmy winner Julia Garner landed the lead after a famously gruelling audition boot camp. According to Variety, the film would have traced Madonna from her start in Michigan through her artistic coming of age in 1980s New York, ending around the 1998 release of "Ray of Light."

Then the bill came in. Madonna says the studio "couldn't get their heads around" the budget her life required, and that her attempt to bring the cost down by shooting in Serbia met open skepticism. "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."

What happened next is the part that should interest anyone who has watched a passion project die in development. When Netflix came calling about a series, Madonna found she could not even use her own pages. "I couldn't use the script I had with Universal unless I bought it from them for an extortionist's price, even though I wrote it," she said. A search for the right showrunner dragged on for eight or nine months and went nowhere.

This is the quiet machinery of the modern biopic, and it tends to grind hardest on the people whose names are in the title. A studio buys a life, a star trains for months to inhabit it, writers cycle through, and the whole edifice can still collapse over a figure executives decide they cannot defend. Garner's boot camp, the auction, the years of meetings -- all of it now sunk cost.

The story does not end in silence, only in a smaller key. Netflix is developing an autobiographical Madonna series through Shawn Levy's deal at the streamer, though Garner is not attached to that version. And in a twist worthy of the industry that produced it, the dead biopic gets a fictional afterlife: Madonna and Garner filmed scenes for the second season of Seth Rogen's Apple comedy "The Studio," in which a Madonna biopic starring Garner heads to the Venice Film Festival for its premiere. The movie Hollywood could not afford to make will screen, at least, as a joke about why it could not be made. Madonna, for her part, has an album out and the only verdict she seems to care about. "I need to do what I was put on this earth to do," she said.