Palo Alto’s Jon M. Chu lands job to direct Britney Spears biopic
Palo Alto-reared director Jon M. Chu, whose film adaptation of “Wicked” could be one of the big movie hits of the 2024 holiday season, has landed another high-profile Hollywood gig: developing and directing a feature film about the life of Britney Spears, based on her best-selling memoir, “The Woman in Me.”
News of Chu’s next big project came via a report Thursday by film industry newsletter, The Ankler. Spears also shared news of the “secret project” on social media.
Universal Pictures won the rights to Spears’ memoir after a highly competitive bidding war, Variety reported. Universal also produced “Wicked,” based on the Tony Award-winning Broadway musical and starring Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo. “Wicked” is due to be released in movie theaters on Nov. 22, the weekend before Thanksgiving.
Spears’ book has sold more than 2.5 copies in the United States alone, Variety reported. The audiobook — read by Academy Award-nominated actor Michelle Williams, with an introduction by Spears — was the fastest-selling in Simon & Schuster’s history. The book chronicles her rise as a pop superstar and major cultural figure, from her days on the “Mickey Mouse Club” through her career as a Grammy Award-winning solo artist. It also deals with her highly publicized and scrutinized conservatorship case and delves into her difficult personal relationships with ex-boyfriend Justin Timberlake and with her family, aspects of which could be viewed as predatory, Variety also reported.
Chu comes to transforming Spears’ life story into a movie after recently publishing his own memoir, “Viewfinder.” In the book, he shares his somewhat unconventional journey from Silicon Valley to Hollywood, where he’s become one of the industry’s most in-demand directors, following his hit 2018 romantic comedy, “Crazy Rich Asians.”
Chu is the son of Lawrence and Ruth Chu, immigrants from China and Taiwan, who own and operate the legendary Chef Chu’s restaurant in Los Altos. For decades, Chef Chu’s has been a destination for Silicon’s Valley elite, serving up what critics call delicious but innovative Chinese comfort food.
In certain ways, Chu has followed in parents’ tradition of serving up crowd-pleasers, as CBS noted in a recent interview with Chu. With “Crazy Rich Asians,” his eighth feature film, Chu also was credited with rewriting the rules of Hollywood. He scored a critical and box office hit with a movie based on the bestselling novel by Kevin Kwan. Unusual for Hollywood, the movie also told a story focused on Asian people, and it was the first mainstream American movie in 25 years that featured a mostly Asian cast.
Chu, 44, grew up doing his homework or helping out in his family’s restaurant, absorbing his parents’ love of American pop culture as well as the spirit of entrepreneurship alive in some of his parents’ customers. He also began making home movies, starting with the purchase of audio/video mixer from a 1992 Sharper Image catalog, Chu shared in an interview this week with CBS.
In a 2018 interview with this news organization, Ruth Chu proudly displayed her son’s student film awards from USC. She also laughed about how she was her own kind of “tiger mom.” Instead of demanding that he and his four siblings become “lawyers, doctors, CPAs,” she pushed them to pursue their passions. When a teenaged Jon tearfully told his parents he wanted to make movies, Ruth Chu bought him a load of books on film studies so he could learn how to make it in cutthroat Hollywood.
During his first 10 years in the industry, Chu initially got early notice from Steven Spielberg, then built his resume by directing concert films for Justin Bieber and several sequel movies, including “Step Up 2” and “G.I. Joe: Retaliation” with Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. But Chu said his parents always encouraged him to make a movie about Chinese people, which led him to make “Crazy Rich Asians.”
Chu’s followup to “Crazy Rich Asians” was the film version of the Lin-Manuel Miranda musical “In the Heights.” Now, he’s gearing up to promote “Wicked.” Actually, the movie coming out Nov. 22 is the first of two parts, with “Wicked Part Two” scheduled to be released in November 2025.
The Broadway musical from which “Wicked” is adapted is itself based on author Gregory Maguire’s 1995 book, “Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West,” The Hollywood Reporter said. That project, in turn, was based on characters that originated in L. Frank Baum’s 1900 novel “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” and were brought to life in the Oscar-winning 1939 film musical “The Wizard of Oz” starring Judy Garland as Dorothy.