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A Britney Spears biopic is in the works from Universal Pictures, with Wicked director Jon M Chu attached to the project.
Spears, 42, published her memoir The Woman In Me in October last year, and the book went on to become an international bestseller and sparked a bidding war for the film rights.
The Ankler reports that Universal beat off interest from Bridgerton producer Shonda Rhimes, Brad Pitt’s Plan B, and Margot Robbie’s LuckyChap Entertainment to win the rights in an eight-figure deal.
Music rights for Spears’s catalog are also reportedly part of the agreement.
The film will be produced by Marc Platt, who is a three-time Oscar nominee for his work on Bridge of Spies, La La Land and The Trial of the Chicago 7.
Platt is also a producer of the upcoming Wicked.
The Woman In Me sold a million copies in its first week on sale, and went on to sell over 2.5 million copies in the US alone.
In a four-star review of the book for The Independent, Adam White wrote: “The Britney Spears memoir, a feverishly anticipated and by all accounts final rebuke to the decades of rumours that have surrounded the star, is rarely fun. It’s bleak, relentless and angry, a portrait of a woman no longer in the eye of the storm but surveying, dazed and indignant, the wreckage left in its wake.
“Reportedly ghostwritten by an unbilled journalist named Sam Lansky, The Woman in Me doesn’t linger on Spears’s globe-conquering stardom, nor the conveyor belt of pop hits she has to her name, nor that multiple generations of people can probably point to the exact moment they first saw her on TV and gasped at the sight of an instant icon. Instead, it opens with a family suicide (of Spears’s grandmother) and only gets more dispiriting from there.
“There are moments of glitz and glamour; Madonna and Donatella Versace swan in to briefly act as celebrity fairy godmothers, while rumours long baked into Britney lore are finally vindicated, from her belief that her sweaty, sozzled 2007 album Blackout is her magnum opus, to confirmation that her two-week fling with Colin Farrell was as sexually explosive as everyone imagined. For the most part, though, this is a scorched-earth kiss-off to an incredibly dysfunctional family, a book so breathtaking in its rage that you can practically see the spittle on its pages.”
