Madonna biopic scrapped: Madonna said the film she planned about her life fell apart after she and Universal split over budget. She said she spent two years on the script and then two years at Universal Studios working with line producers on budgeting and casting.
Universal and Madonna
“I’ve had an extraordinary life. I’ve had a huge life, so I needed a big budget,” she said in an Interview Magazine interview. That is the core of the collapse: a long development period ended because the money she thought the story required did not match what the studio would support.
“We had a falling out, me and Universal, regarding budget,” Madonna said. She added that Universal told her, “We don’t believe you’d stay in Serbia more than four days.”
Serbia and the script
Madonna said she found a cheaper way to make the project in Serbia, but the studio did not buy the plan. In practical terms, that meant the script and the production approach stopped being a shared roadmap and became a dispute over whether the movie could be made at all.
She said she could not use the Universal script for a later Netflix series unless she bought it back for an extortionist's price. That left her with a project that had already absorbed years of development but no clean way to carry the work into the new format.
Netflix and nine months
Netflix later reached out to make a series, and Madonna said she spent another eight or nine months trying to understand how that version would work while looking for a showrunner. She also said her whole life has been survival, which fits the way this project has moved: from a film plan, to a stalled studio deal, to a separate series search.
Madonna also said she reached out to Stuart Price because she thought people need to dance. For now, the main unanswered business question is how much the studio would have needed to match before the film could move ahead — and the answer clearly was not close enough.
