Madonna breaks silence on ‘falling out’ that led to axed biopic

Madonna has revealed a “falling out” with Universal Studios led to the cancellation of her planned biopic.

In a new interview, the Queen of Pop, 67, said she spent years working on the film, but it never made it to the production stage as she could not secure the budget she needed.

“I was supposed to make a movie about my life. I worked on my script for two years and spent two years at Universal Studios with the line producers doing budgeting and casting,” she told Interview Magazine.

“We had a falling out, me and Universal, regarding budget ... I’ve had an extraordinary life. I’ve had a huge life, so I needed a big budget.”

However, she said the studio “couldn’t get their heads around it”.

As a workaround, the Vogue singer found a way to make it cheaper in Serbia – but Universal was not interested.

“Maybe they just didn’t believe in me. One of their first reactions was, ‘We don’t believe you’d stay in Serbia more than four days.’ And I said, ‘Did you read the script?’ My whole life has been survival. I’m not going there for a holiday,” she said.

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Netflix then approached her for a series, but they had to start from scratch unless she bought the script she’d written for Universal “for an extortionist’s price”.

“That’s just the way it goes. I started trying to understand how making a series would work. It’s a very, very different process. You have to meet a lot of writers and find the right showrunner, and I couldn’t find one,” Madonna said.

After eight months, the Netflix project stalled, prompting her to return to focusing on her music career.

That led to her upcoming album, Confessions on a Dance Floor: Part II, the successor to her famed 2005 dance record.

However, partway through its creation, she and Netflix found a writer she liked – meaning the series is back in development at the streamer.

No other details are known, but Madonna’s casting “boot camps” made big headlines in 2022.

Inventing Anna star Julia Garner beat out other stars including Alexa Demie and Florence Pugh to play the pop star.

“I wasn’t a trained dancer and I had to learn how to dance and then dance in front of her and convince her that I can dance and sing. And sing with her!” the 32-year-old said of the gruelling process on the SmartLess podcast in 2025.

“I just thought, ‘OK, what would Madonna do?’ Which is convince you that she deserves to be in this room, and I owned it.”