Earlier this week, A24 announced that the highly-anticipated Ronnie Spector biopic, starring Zendaya, will be directed by Barry Jenkins. The film, titled Be My Baby (of course), is based on Spector’s 1990 memoir Be My Baby: How I Survived Mascara, Miniskirts, and Madness, or, My Life as a Fabulous Ronette. The girl-group legend personally chose Zendaya to play her shortly before her death in 2022. “Thank you for sharing your life with me, I could listen to your stories for hours and hours,” Zendaya wrote in a tribute back then. “I hope I make you proud.”
Be My Baby is just one of the several highly buzzy biopics of female musicians that are currently in the works. There’s also the long-promised Janis Joplin film starring Shailene Woodley, as well as a Linda Ronstadt movie where the powerhouse vocalist will be played by Selena Gomez. These movies all follow a slew of successful male biopics — most obviously last year’s Bob Dylan film A Complete Unknown, which garnered Oscar nominations for star Timothée Chalamet and others, but also the Queen movie, which Rami Malek actually won an Oscar for, and don’t forget the recent films that dramatized the life stories of Elvis, Elton John, Bob Marley, Mötley Crüe, and Robbie Williams as a chimp for some reason. It will be refreshing to see female musicians get the same Hollywood treatment.
These films famously take years to make, and projects often fall apart due to entanglements with musicians’ estates and music rights. In December 2024, Woodley knocked on the wood of Jimmy Fallon’s desk so she didn’t jinx the chances of the Joplin film happening. “We’ve been working on it for seven years now,” she told the TV host. “She’s such a groovy chick, man. She really brought the light to this planet in a really singular way.”
The Joplin project, produced by Woodley and backed by Temple Hill Entertainment, was revealed in a press release by California Film Commission last September, granting the film a tax credit. “[It’s] such an amazing gift for this film, because we actually get to film in California, which rarely happens these days,” Woodley said. “And for Janis, it’s so important.” However, it’s still unclear if the Joplin estate is participating.
If it does, Woodley will sing her own vocals in the film. She spoke to Fallon about working alongside Linda Perry, who is serving as the film’s music producer. “She’s really pushed me to figure out how to find my own voice, in a way,” Woodley said. “Because I was like, ‘I can’t sing like Janis,’ and she put me in a lot of uncomfortable situations. ‘Show up here on this date.’ A massive empty warehouse with a full band. And she’s like ‘Have fun! Sing some songs!’ I was like, ‘I don’t know how to sing anything! Christmas carols? Like, what do I sing?’”
Gomez has been incredibly busy, making albums with her fiancé Benny Blanco, starring in a hit comedy series on Hulu, and appearing in an Oscar-winning (and controversial) Netflix film. But in November 2024, she confirmed in an interview with Vanity Fair that the Ronstadt film was still underway. “That’s still happening, though I’m not sure when,” she said, adding that she met Ronstadt and “read two books” — presumably her 2013 memoir Simple Dreams and 2022’s Feels Like Home: A Song for the Sonoran Borderlands.
“I just found her to be so [compelling],” Gomez said. “She had such an interesting perspective on music and life, and I really admired that. She never really needed to be as successful, and she was willing to try different things. But there’s a reason it’s taking time. We want to make sure it’s going to be good.”
Like Zendaya and Be My Baby, the Ronstadt project is authorized, with the singer’s longtime manager John Boylan and James Keach (who produced the 2019 doc Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice) signed on to co-produce. David O. Russell is slated to direct.
Hopefully, the Joplin and Ronstadt projects will follow Be My Baby’s lead and focus on a singular moment in the musician’s saga, instead of an exhaustive life story start-to-finish. (Zendaya and Jenkins have said they will center the biopic on the Ronettes singer’s tumultuous six-year marriage to controversial producer Phil Spector.) We’re also hopeful that the three films will avoid falling into what we’ve decided to call the Back to Black trap, in which a female musician’s story is heavily focused on her romantic relationships instead of her art. We’ll just have to wait until any of these films make it into theaters to see.
