One surefire way to grab an audience’s attention is to cast a famous actor in a music biopic about an equally famous artist. Think Timothée Chalamet as Bob Dylan, Austin Butler as Elvis Presley, Jeremy Allen White as Bruce Springsteen, and Rami Malek’s Oscar-winning turn as Freddie Mercury in Bohemian Rhapsody. “The success of Bohemian Rhapsody raised eyebrows about what could happen when you’re successful with a biographical film,” Larry Mestel, CEO of Primary Wave Music, a leading music publisher and talent management company told Vanity Fair last year of the music biopic boom in recent years. “It’s been a big explosion. For many years, artists didn’t want to make films that depicted their life story because they were afraid of how it would come out. There’s a much greater openness now that there’s been a bunch of these films that have done very well—their success, but also how the stories have been told and the quality being as vivid as it has been.”
Further proof of this industry-wide trend: last week’s report from Bloomberg, citing people close to the matter, that Warner Music Group (WMG) is “close to an agreement” with Netflix to create movies and documentaries based on the company’s artists and songs. “Our company has a tremendous catalog: Prince, Madonna, Fleetwood Mac,” WMG CEO Robert Kyncl said at the Bloomberg Screentime conference on Wednesday, October 8, without confirming a specific deal or explicitly naming the streamer. “It just goes on and on and on. The stories we have are incredible, and they haven’t really been told. We’re like Marvel [Comics] for music.”
Multiple movies about Warner Music artists have already been made (see Joaquin Phoenix as Johnny Cash in 2005’s Walk the Line) or are already in the works—including Selena Gomez as Linda Ronstadt, Leonardo DiCaprio as Frank Sinatra, and Jennifer Lawrence as Ava Gardner. And John Lennon is covered by Harris Dickinson, who plays one-fourth of the Beatles for Sam Mendes’s upcoming four-part film project. But there are dozens of other musicians who’ve earned the biopic treatment.
Below, five Warner Music artists whose stories we’d like to see on the big screen.
Stevie Nicks
An authorized AppleTV+ documentary about Fleetwood Mac from five-time Academy Award nominee Frank Marshall is on the way, but Nicks would also make a compelling heroine in her own biopic. Many of Hollywood’s leading women agree: Margot Robbie, Shailene Woodley, Kate Hudson, and Dakota Fanning—as pitched by her sister Elle during reporting for their recent Vanity Fair cover story—have expressed interest in playing the beloved rocker.
Nicks seems more open to creative interpretation of her story, given that she approved of Daisy Jones & the Six—a musical Amazon series inspired by Fleetwood Mac—with flying colors. In addition to some of Nicks’s solo hits like “Edge of Seventeen” and “Leather and Lace,” a potential biopic would also presumably cover her tumultuous relationship with bandmate Lindsey Buckingham, the cocaine addiction she’s spoken about in the press, and how Taylor Swift has proven to be a musical successor of sorts.
Madonna
With pop hits including “Like a Virgin,” “Material Girl,” “Like a Prayer,” and “Vogue,” there’s no denying that a biopic about Madonna would have people dancing in the aisles of their local theater. Madge thought so too, announcing back in 2020 that she would direct a biopic about herself. An intensive casting bootcamp that reportedly involved Florence Pugh and Euphoria’s Alexa Demie commenced in 2022.
Emmy-winning Ozark and Inventing Anna star Julia Garner reportedly landed the part; however, in January 2023, Variety reported that Universal Pictures was no longer developing the project. But Garner and Madonna have remained in the same circles, posing together for a picture at photographer and filmmaker Steven Klein’s May 2023 birthday party. In December of that year, Garner joined Madonna onstage during a Brooklyn tour stop. In July of 2024, Madonna teased the script, which bore the working title Who’s That Girl, a reference to her 1987 film and the hit title song. Garner recently suggested that the project might be back on track: “I can’t say too much about it, but yes, it’s a work in progress,” she told W magazine.
Sammy Davis Jr.
Perhaps no one has had more stops and starts when it comes to getting the musical biopic treatment than Sammy Davis Jr, who died in 1990 at the age of 64. The jazz entertainer’s storied life has inspired smaller-scale portrayals like Tim Meadows’s performance in Wayne’s World 2 or Don Cheadle’s in the 1998 HBO film The Rat Pack, as well as long-gestating movies involving everyone from Oscar-nominated filmmaker Lee Daniels to Oscar-winning actor Denzel Washington over the years. But there has never been a full-fledged biopic about Davis’s life and music.
Among the most fascinating tidbits about Davis—that time he read the wrong name from an Oscar envelope long before the great Moonlight–La La Land debacle of 2017, as well as his taboo romance with Alfred Hitchcock muse Kim Novak. The latter is being mined for drama by Colman Domingo, who is set to make his feature directorial debut with Scandalous, a period drama about the 1950s relationship between Novak and Davis starring Sydney Sweeney and David Jonsson as the two leads. Back in 2020, Deadline reported that MGM was developing a biopic with Lena Waithe producing through her Hillman Grad banner, adapting the film from the 1996 biography Sammy Davis Jr.: My Father written by Davis’ daughter, Tracey Davis, and Dolores A. Barclay. Five years later, that project has yet to materialize.
Nina Simone
Sometimes biopics must be made because Hollywood didn’t get it right the first time. Look no further than trailblazing musician and civil rights activist Nina Simone, whose tortured musical genius was heartbreakingly detailed in Alan Light’s 2016 biography What Happened, Miss Simone?—a book inspired by the Oscar-nominated 2015 documentary of the same name. Those titles—along with Simone’s own 1992 autobiography, I Put a Spell on You—paint a tragic portrait of an artist often plagued by mental illness in her pursuit of great music. But that doesn’t translate in the lone existing biopic about Simone. Released in 2016, Nina was thought to be dead on arrival given the controversy surrounding the casting of Zoe Saldaña in the titular role. The actor is of Dominican and Puerto Rican descent, and used skin-darkening makeup when playing Simone, as well as a prosthetic nose.
When the casting was announced in 2012, the singer’s daughter Lisa Simone Kelly lauded Saldaña’s acting, but said: “Appearance-wise, this is not the best choice.” She called for actors with “beautiful, luscious lips and wide noses” to play her mother. In 2016, the official Twitter account run by Simone’s estate told Saldaña: “Please take Nina’s name out your mouth. For the rest of your life.” Saldaña initially defended her right to play the role, but later apologized. “I should have never accepted the part,” Saldaña told CBS Sunday Morning in 2023. “I am Black and nobody will ever tell me how to be Black. But as a person of Afro-Latino and African heritage, I have to understand just how complex this conversation needs to be,” she said. Saldaña also revealed the personal pain that the casting backlash caused. “I felt I hurt her,” said Saldaña. “I grew up listening to her. I felt like she did sing to me. Because if I don’t fit in that world, what other world was I gonna fit in? Definitely not the white world.” A new Nina-centered project would course-correct this casting error and recontextualize Simone’s legacy for a new generation.
Adam Sandler
Unlike the aforementioned subjects, Sandler is not primarily known as a musician. But the actor is signed to Warner Music Group and has been known to get musical across his nearly four-decade career—from “The Chanukuah Song” to The Wedding Singer’s “Grow Old With You.” In fact, it was Sandler’s ability to tell jokes through song that led him to get over the stage fright that plagued his early days on Saturday Night Live. “I used to get so scared on stage and so nervous when I didn’t have a guitar. And I’d forget my lines. I’d forget my jokes, that kind of thing,” Sandler told NPR in 2019. “And then, when I started playing guitar onstage and singing funny tunes, I had more confidence than usual.”
Sandler has picked up a guitar multiple times in recent years, including on his 2024 standup special Love You, which was directed by Josh Safdie, whom Sandler worked with to critical acclaim on the 2019 drama Uncut Gems. Sandler ended his 2018 special, 100% Fresh, with a heartfelt musical tribute to the late Chris Farley, his friend and former Saturday Night Live castmate. A Sandler biopic or documentary also feels like the most probable given his lucrative preexisting Netflix deal—he’s already gaining awards buzz for his performance opposite George Clooney in Jay Kelly—also for the streamer. Perhaps a Sandler-esque musical would best capture the energy that has fueled his professional life. “I just have a natural part of my brain that feels like I don’t belong here,” he previously told Vanity Fair. “This feeling uncomfortable and loser stuff I’ve been doing for years, it’s in me.”
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