One surefire strategy to seize an viewers’s consideration is to solid a well-known actor in a music biopic about an equally well-known artist. Suppose Timothée Chalamet as Bob Dylan, Austin Butler as Elvis Presley, Jeremy Allen White as Bruce Springsteen, and Rami Malek’s Oscar-winning flip as Freddie Mercury in Bohemian Rhapsody. “The success of Bohemian Rhapsody raised eyebrows about what might occur while you’re profitable with a biographical movie,” Larry Mestel, CEO of Main Wave Music, a number one music writer and expertise administration firm informed Self-importance Truthful final yr of the music biopic increase in recent times. “It’s been a giant explosion. For a few years, artists didn’t wish to make movies that depicted their life story as a result of they have been afraid of how it might come out. There’s a a lot better openness now that there’s been a bunch of those movies which have carried out very nicely—their success, but in addition how the tales have been informed and the standard being as vivid because it has been.”
Additional proof of this industry-wide pattern: final week’s report from Bloomberg, citing individuals near the matter, that Warner Music Group (WMG) is “near an settlement” with Netflix to create films and documentaries based mostly on the corporate’s artists and songs. “Our firm has an amazing catalog: Prince, Madonna, Fleetwood Mac,” WMG CEO Robert Kyncl mentioned on the Bloomberg Screentime convention on Wednesday, October 8, with out confirming a particular deal or explicitly naming the streamer. “It simply goes on and on and on. The tales we have now are unimaginable, and so they haven’t actually been informed. We’re like Marvel [Comics] for music.”
A number of films about Warner Music artists have already been made (see Joaquin Phoenix as Johnny Money in 2005’s Stroll the Line) or are already within the works—together with Selena Gomez as Linda Ronstadt, Leonardo DiCaprio as Frank Sinatra, and Jennifer Lawrence as Ava Gardner. And John Lennon is roofed by Harris Dickinson, who performs one-fourth of the Beatles for Sam Mendes’s upcoming four-part movie venture. However there are dozens of different musicians who’ve earned the biopic remedy.
Beneath, 5 Warner Music artists whose tales we’d prefer to see on the large display screen.
Stevie Nicks
Stevie Nicks acting at a Canadian music competition in 1983.Paul Natkin/Getty Pictures
