In a coup for Donna Langley’s team at Universal, the studio has secured rights to pop icon Britney Spears’s bestselling memoir The Woman In Me and attached Jon M. Chu to direct.
Chu directed Universal’s big holiday and awards season contender Wicked, and reunites with that film’s producer Marc Platt.
The studio prevailed in what will have been a highly competitive auction. The Woman In Me was published in 2023 and chronicles the star’s career, battles with depression and abuse, and the 2021 termination of a conservatorship court order that had placed her father in charge of all life decisions for nearly 14 years.
Spears broke out as a teenager with her hit “…Baby One More Time” and went on to record five number one hits and six number one albums in the US. She has won one Grammy and been nominated eight times. In 2022 she collaborated with Elton John on “Hold Me Closer”, her first recording since 2022.
The memoir sold more than 2.5million copies in the United States, a remarkable amount, and the audiobook narrated by Michelle Williams with an introduction by Spears became the fastest selling in Simon & Schuster’s history.
Universal’s music biographies include 2015’s Straight Outta Compton tracing the rise to fame of the rap group N.W.A., and 8 Mile starring Eminem.
The studio is in development on a Snoop Dogg biopic and an untitled feature inspired by the music of Prince, which Ryan Coogler’s Proximity Media is producing. It recently wrapped production on an Untitled Pharrell Williams & Michel Gondry Project.
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