When a movie is scrapped in the development stage — as countless have been — it’s usually memorialized by an intern sending a script through the shredder. When you’re Madonna, however, you get a Viking funeral with an Apple TV budget.
That’s what paparazzi photos from Italy revealed two weeks ago, when the pop icon was captured filming scenes in Venice for the second season of Seth Rogen’s “The Studio.” Madonna’s appearance on the acclaimed series will draw on her recent Hollywood struggles to get a biopic about her own life made.
Madonna hasn’t appeared on TV since shooting a cameo on “Will & Grace” in 2003, and she hasn’t starred in a film since 2002’s disastrous remake of “Swept Away.” So it’s no small feat for Rogen to recruit her for “The Studio,” a forensic look at life inside a legacy movie company battling for relevance and survival. It helped, however, that many other moguls and A-listers have been willing to send up their image on the Emmy-winning series. The first season attracted heavyweights like Martin Scorsese, Charlize Theron, Zoë Kravitz and Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos, all playing themselves. What’s more interesting, according to two sources, is how Rogen’s show will use the real-life circumstances around the singer’s scrapped biopic to illustrate the challenges of modern moviemaking. Madonna will appear in a two-episode arc, the sources add.
First, some history. In 2021, Universal Pictures won a multi-studio auction to make a film about Madonna’s life. Amy Pascal was on board to produce, and Madonna would co-write and direct the project. Top actresses, including Florence Pugh, endured a grueling audition process that included a singing and dancing “boot camp.” Julia Garner, the Emmy-winning star of “Inventing Anna” and “Ozark,” won the part in 2022. Insiders say the film would have followed Madonna from her humble beginnings in Michigan through her artistic coming of age in the gritty New York City of the ’80s, leading right up to the 1998 release of “Ray of Light” (an album that brought her a dramatic reinvention and new heights of stardom).
Several script rewrites came down before the film was shelved entirely in 2023, as Madonna’s longtime manager Guy Oseary convinced her to go on a career-spanning, blockbuster world tour and leave her directorial ambitions behind. Eventually, rights to her life and music catalog lapsed at Universal. Netflix is now developing an autobiographical series about her, via director Shawn Levy’s exclusive TV deal at the streamer. Garner is not attached to that version.
Those who wished to see Garner clad in fishnets and rubber bracelets as the Material Girl will still have a chance. Sort of. The “Studio” scripts will rewrite history, subbing in Rogen’s fictional company Continental Studios as the producer-financier of the Madonna-Garner movie that never was. The core Continental team — played by Rogen, Kathryn Hahn, Bryan Cranston, Ike Barinholtz and Chase Sui Wonders — takes the biopic to Italy for a splashy debut at the Venice Film Festival, where Madonna and Garner are on hand to hype the project and nab some Oscar buzz, sources say. Another insider close to production said that, in “The Studio,” Madonna will not play the director of her fictional biopic. Emmy winner Donald Glover was also photographed on the Italian set with the singer and Garner, so we’ll let you draw your own conclusions. And, as many industry insiders predicted, the back half of Madonna’s episodes focuses on the all-important debate around journalists timing festival standing ovations to provide a sense of how films will play in the wider world. Trust us — it’s a whole thing.
The Madonna get represents an impressive high-wire act for Rogen and “The Studio” co-creator Evan Goldberg, one that required them to land an image-conscious megastar and convince her to resurrect a real project that failed to launch. We have a sneaking suspicion that Madonna will get her Hollywood ending, at least by the standards of “The Studio.” A Netflix spokesperson declined to comment on the matter. An Apple TV spokesperson couldn’t be reached for comment.
If nothing else, the Venice shoot gave fans a viral moment 41 years in the making. Garner and Madonna paid homage to the 1984 music video for “Like a Virgin,” pouting to camera and gliding in a gondola down the Venice canals. If only development moved so easily.
