If the upcoming biopics about Bob Dylan and Michael Jackson weren't enough, TriStar announced on Tuesday that a film about Culture Club frontman, Boy George, is in development.
Deadline reports that Boy George himself will be involved in the project as an executive producer. Boy George is joined by one of the the Oscar-winning producers of Crash (not the Cronenberg one), Cathy Schulman, as well as Jeremy M. Rosen, Kevin King Templeton, and his manager Paul Kemsley.
This film will be the newest addition to a rapidly growing list of music biopics currently in active development. As of this writing, over a dozen music biopics are currently known to be in development. This list of artists includes Bruce Springsteen, Linda Ronstadt, and a series of four movies on the Beatles (one for each Beatle.) As is always the case with Hollywood, how many of these films will make it to production and eventual release is anyone's guess, but right now, Boy George is sitting at the top of the pile.
This year got off to a bumpy start with Back to Black, the critically panned Amy Winehouse biopic. We'll close out the year with A Complete Unknown starring Timothée Chalamet as Bob Dylan, coming in just under the wire on Christmas eve. It's worth noting that A Complete Unknown is directed by James Mangold, the man behind Logan, and more importantly, the 2005 Johnny Cash biopic, Walk the Line.
Walk the Line was parodied in 2007's Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story; parodied so well in fact, that for the next decade, the genre saw a significant decline. Moviegoers became conscious of the music biopic formula. Thus, filmmakers were forced to recalibrate and move away from melodramatic, three hour, life-spanning epics, toward smaller films that focus of a specific period or event in an artist's career.
It is reported that the Boy George biopic will focus on the peak of Culture Club's success. The script will be adapted from Boy George's several autobiographies by screenwriter J.C. Lee, whose previous credits include television series like Love, Victor and The Morning Show. Lee wrote the play, Luce, and then went on to co-write the script for the 2019 film adaptation of the same name.
As Hollywood gears up for another go, the question remains: are we in for a music biopic renaissance? Or will it, like a Karma Chameleon, come and go?
What do you think?
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