One surefire way to grab an audience’s attention is to cast a famous actor in a music biopic about an equally famous artist. Think Timothée Chalamet as Bob Dylan, Austin Butler as Elvis Presley, Jeremy Allen White as Bruce Springsteen, and Rami Malek’s Oscar-winning turn as Freddie Mercury in Bohemian Rhapsody. “The success of Bohemian Rhapsody raised eyebrows about what could happen when you’re successful with a biographical film,” Larry Mestel, CEO of Primary Wave Music, a leading music publisher and talent management company told Vanity Fair last year of the music biopic boom in recent years. “It’s been a big explosion. For many years, artists didn’t want to make films that depicted their life story because they were afraid of how it would come out. There’s a much greater openness now that there’s been a bunch of these films that have done very well—their success, but also how the stories have been told and the quality being as vivid as it has been.”
Further proof of this industry-wide trend: last week’s report from Bloomberg, citing people close to the matter, that Warner Music Group (WMG) is “close to an agreement” with Netflix to create movies and documentaries based on the company’s artists and songs. “Our company has a tremendous catalog: Prince, Madonna, Fleetwood Mac,” WMG CEO Robert Kyncl said at the Bloomberg Screentime conference on Wednesday, October 8, without confirming a specific deal or explicitly naming the streamer. “It just goes on and on and on. The stories we have are incredible, and they haven’t really been told. We’re like Marvel [Comics] for music.”
Multiple movies about Warner Music artists have already been made (see Joaquin Phoenix as Johnny Cash in 2005’s Walk the Line) or are already in the works—including Selena Gomez as Linda Ronstadt, Leonardo DiCaprio as Frank Sinatra, and Jennifer Lawrence as Ava Gardner. And John Lennon is covered by Harris Dickinson, who plays one-fourth of the Beatles for Sam Mendes’s upcoming four-part film project. But there are dozens of other musicians who’ve earned the biopic treatment.
Below, five Warner Music artists whose stories we’d like to see on the big screen.
Stevie Nicks
Stevie Nicks performing at a Canadian music festival in 1983.Paul Natkin/Getty Images
