Madonna On “Falling Out” With Universal Pictures Over Biopic: “I’ve Had a Huge Life, So I Needed a Big Budget”

Madonna is opening up about the biopic that Universal Pictures axed and revealing why it did not move forward.

In a new interview, the Material Girl said the main reason the biopic was shelved was the budget.

“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,” Madonna said in Interview magazine.

She continued, “We had a falling out, me and Universal, regarding budget because I needed — I’ve had an extraordinary life. I’ve had a huge life, so I needed a big budget. You know what I mean?”

Madonna was co-writing the film and was attached to direct as well. Over the years, Diablo Cody and Erin Cressida Wilson were also attached to write, with Julia Garner confirmed to play Madonna on the big screen.

The singer said that Universal “couldn’t get their heads around it. I found a way to make it for less money in Serbia, but I don’t think they were into the idea of—I don’t know.”

“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 added. “But anyway, I was in limbo when that fell apart, and then Netflix reached out to make a series. That was a whole other long process, because I couldn’t use the script I had with Universal unless I bought it from them for an extortionist’s price, even though I wrote it. Don’t ask.”

“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. This went on for another eight or nine months. I was like, ‘Good thing I have another job because I need to work, I need to create. I need to do what I was put on this earth to do.’”

In 2025, Deadline reported that Madonna was teaming up with Shawn Levy for a limited bioseries at Netflix. Later that year, Julia Garner said that playing Madonna in a biopic was still “a work in progress.”