Highlights
- Julia Garner told CBS Sunday Morning the Madonna biopic’s status changes ‘every hour’ and admits it’s not up to her.
- Madonna says Universal killed the film over budget, and a later Netflix series with Shawn Levy reportedly stalled too.
- Garner and Madonna keep teaming up anyway, from the Confessions II film to the 2026 VMAs and a Venice-set The Studio.
Julia Garner has no idea whether she’ll ever play Madonna in a movie, and frankly, neither does anyone else. “I don’t know. Every hour it changes, in a way,” she told CBS Sunday Morning.
That is the most honest status report this cursed project has gotten in six years.
The biopic was announced in 2020, with Madonna directing and co-writing alongside Diablo Cody and Erin Cressida Wilson. Universal reportedly scrapped it in January 2023.
Garner won the role in 2022 after singing and dancing her way through a brutal audition, so she’s earned the right to be blunt. “It’s not up to me,” she said.
She’s still carrying a torch, though. “I would love for the movie to get made, obviously,” Garner added.
Her consolation prize? “Whatever happens, like, I made a great friend. I love Madonna. I think she’s incredible.”
That friend, it turns out, is a drill sergeant. “She works. She taught me properly how to work,” Garner said of the audition gauntlet.
Which was a problem, because Garner admits, “I wasn’t a trained dancer.”
Madonna has been far less diplomatic about why the film died. She told Interview in June that Universal balked at her budget: “I’ve had a huge life, so I needed a big budget.”
Her read on the studio’s thinking was even spicier. “Maybe they just didn’t believe in me.”
Plan B was a Netflix series developed with Shawn Levy. That reportedly stalled, too.
Track Garner’s quotes and you get a Hollywood grief cycle in real time. In July 2025, on SmartLess, she insisted, “That’s supposed to still happen.”
In September 2025, she told W it was “a work in progress.” This September, to ELLE, it became “I think the movie has to get made. But we’ll see.”
Now we’ve reached “every hour it changes.” Acceptance, apparently, looks like a polite shrug on Sunday morning television.
Meanwhile, these two keep finding workarounds. Garner played a younger Madonna in the Confessions II film, joined her onstage at the 2026 VMAs, and shot an episode of The Studio with her in Venice.
She also told ELLE that Madonna is “one of the funniest people I’ve ever met. Like, actually. And people don’t know that.”
So the Madonna movie now exists everywhere except a movie theater. Every hour it changes, and somehow the answer never does.
