Okay, a Britney Spears biopic is officially happening… and this one could be REALLY interesting.
Elizabeth “Liz” Meriwether, creator of New Girl and the screenwriter behind the upcoming Britney Spears biopic, says she’s still in the very early stages of figuring out exactly how to tell Britney’s story.
And honestly, where the hell do you even start?
Britney exploded onto the scene as a teenager in the late ’90s, and when …Baby One More Time arrived in 1999, she didn’t just become another pop star.
She became a cultural phenomenon.
The music. The schoolgirl video. Oops!… I Did It Again. Toxic. Blackout. Circus. Crossroads. For a while there, Britney Spears wasn’t just part of pop culture—she practically WAS pop culture.
But that’s only half the story.
Meriwether says what happened to Britney came during a “perfect storm” of intense celebrity attention and emerging forms of media, and that’s probably where this movie could become something much more interesting than your typical rise-fall-comeback music biopic.
Because we all watched it happen.
The tabloids followed her everywhere. Paparazzi turned her life into entertainment. Every relationship, breakup, mistake and bad day became a headline. And millions of us consumed it without really questioning what that kind of relentless attention was doing to the person at the center of it.
Then came the conservatorship.
Britney was placed under a court-ordered conservatorship in 2008 that controlled major aspects of her life for nearly 14 years, finally ending in November 2021.
That’s a hell of a story.
And if this movie is willing to actually examine the machinery surrounding Britney—the fame, money, media, celebrity culture and the people who benefited while she was struggling—rather than simply recreating the greatest hits and throwing a few wigs on an actress, there’s a genuinely great movie hiding in there.
Britney Spears’ story isn’t just about becoming one of the biggest pop stars on Earth.
It’s about what happened when the entire world decided she belonged to us.
