Today in yes, really: Clint Eastwood may direct Beyoncé in A Star Is Born remake
Warner Bros. is moving forward on its long-proposed remake of George Cukor’s A Star Is Born, with Beyoncé playing the struggling ingénue who just can’t seem to catch a break even though she looks like Beyoncé. And while this sounds like a job tailor-made for a Bill Condon or Baz Luhrmann, the studio’s frontrunner is reportedly Clint Eastwood, who’s dealt with this sort of musical melodrama before in Bird. Of course, A Star Is Born is very much the matryoshka doll of remakes: Cukor’s Judy Garland-starring version is itself a song-and-dance version of the 1937 drama starring Janet Gaynor, and Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson made the most successful iteration of A Star Is Born to date in 1976. (We look forward to a fresh bouquet of passive-aggressive Barbra Streisand quotes should this new version get greenlit.) And naturally talk of another remake begins anew with every generation of female pop stars—like the early-’90s rumors that Whitney Houston might star alongside Eddie Murphy or Wesley Snipes as the washed-up matinee idol who plays Svengali to her career.