"Wicked" director Jon M. Chu says he's caught early glimpses of the screenplay for his upcoming Britney Spears biopic, penned by Liz Meriwether, and he's impressed by what he's seen so far. Speaking Saturday at the opening gala of the George Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles, Chu offered a rare, if guarded, update on the project's progress.
"She's doing many beautiful things and I may or may have not gotten glimpses of what she's been doing and it's incredible," Chu said. "It's incredible, profound, beautiful. And that's all I can say about it. You already got me to say too much."
Meriwether was reported in July to have joined the film as screenwriter. The project is based on Spears's bestselling 2023 memoir "The Women in Me," with Marc Platt producing under his overall deal with Universal Pictures.
Despite the momentum, Chu made clear that casting remains far off. "I get emails every day, hundreds of emails from people all around the world. Thank you for sending all your auditions," he said. "I am not even thinking about casting right now. We're just trying to get the story right." Asked whether he has been spending time with Spears herself, Chu declined to elaborate: "I cannot say anything right now."
He was more forthcoming about his personal taste in Spears's catalog. "I have a lot of favorite Britney songs, but I would say the one that I'm educating my children about Britney right now is, 'Hit Me Baby,' of course," he said, referencing "...Baby One More Time." He added that he also favors early tracks like "Soda Pop" and "E-mail My Heart," noting, "I'm starting them from the very beginning right now."
The biopic has been in the works since Universal Pictures acquired the rights a little more than two years ago. At the time, Spears tweeted about a "secret project," praising Platt for having "always made my favorite movies" and urging fans to "stay tuned" for updates.
Meriwether, best known for television's "New Girl," "The Dropout," "Dying for Sex" and the recent Hulu hit "Furious," spoke in August about adjusting to the format shift required for the film. "It's really interesting because I haven't written a movie in a long time, so that's been part of the process is just trying to think in a two-hour story as opposed to like an eight-hour story, which is what I've been used to doing," she said.
Photo: Bea Phi, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
