Jon M. Chu Will Not Cast Britney Spears Actor Until the Story for Movie Biopic Is Locked: ‘Not Even Thinking About Casting’

It may be some time before cameras begin to roll on Jon M. Chu’s Britney Spears movie biopic, but the “Wicked” filmmaker has read some of the script from writer Liz Meriwether.

“She’s doing many beautiful things and I may or may have not gotten glimpses of what she’s been doing and it’s incredible,” Chu told me Saturday at the opening gala of the George Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles. “It’s incredible, profound, beautiful. And that’s all I can say about it. You already got me to say too much.”

It was reported in July that Meriwether boarded the project to pen the screenplay, which is based on Spears’s bestselling 2023 memoir “The Women in Me.” Marc Platt is producing under his deal with Universal Pictures.

No casting has been announced. “I get emails every day, hundreds of emails from people all around the world. Thank you for sending all your auditions,” Chu said. “I am not even thinking about casting right now. We’re just trying to get the story right.”

Has Chu been spending time with the “Toxic” hitmaker? “I cannot say anything right now,” he said.

He was, however, willing to talk about his favorite Spears songs. “I have a lot of favorite Britney songs, but I would say the one that I’m educating my children about Britney right now is, ‘Hit Me Baby,’ of course,” he said referring to “…Baby One More Time.” “But I like some of the early, early [songs] like ‘Soda Pop,’ which is kind of crazy or [‘E-mail My Heart’]. I’m starting them from the very beginning right now.”

When the news broke a little more than two years ago that Universal Pictures landed the rights to the biopic, Spears tweeted about a “secret project,” writing on social media that Platt has “always made my favorite movies” and telling her fans to “stay tuned” for more news.

Meriwether, best known for television’s “New Girl,” “The Dropout,” “Dying for Sex” and the recent hit Hulu series “Furious,” told me in August, “It’s really interesting because I haven’t written a movie in a long time, so that’s been part of the process is just trying to think in a two-hour story as opposed to like an eight-hour story, which is what I’ve been used to doing.”