Although we’re a fair few years past “Not A Girl, Not Yet A Woman” territory, there is a new girl entering Britney Spears’ pop culture life. Or, rather, a New Girl creator, as The Hollywood Reporter writes today that Liz Meriwether has been tapped to write the (allegedly) brewing biopic about the musical superstar.
The authorized biopic has been in the works for about two years at this point, with Wicked‘s Jon M. Chu and Marc Platt both involved in a directorial and production capacity, respectively. The film is set to be based on Spears’ 2023 memoir The Woman In Me, a fairly warts-and-all telling of her life story released while she was still fighting against her family’s conservatorship over her, and in which she goes into pretty hefty detail about drug abuse, struggles with depression, and her relationships with guys like Justin Timberlake, Colin Farrell, and eventual husband Kevin Federline. The film is being set up at Universal, which pretty clearly saw the big stacks of money Lionsgate was bringing in with Michael earlier this year and decided it was time to reinvest in the musical superstar biopic game.
Meriwether, for her part, has kept pretty relentlessly busy since New Girl went off the air at Fox back in 2018: Since then, she’s served as a writer and executive producer on ABC’s Bless This Mess and Single Parents, Hulu’s The Dropout, and, most recently, FX On Hulu’s Dying For Sex. (Her next project, meanwhile, is the Emmy Rossum-starring Furious, a pretty hefty departure in tone from her more famous work.) That being said, Meriwether usually works as a TV writer, with only one movie made from one of her scripts under her belt: 2011 “friends with benefits” comedy No Strings Attached. It’ll be interesting to see how she handles the heavier material in Spears’ best-selling memoir (some of which Spears later publicly apologized for including in the final manuscript).
Keep scrolling for more great stories.