Whitney Houston Estate & Clive Davis Prepping Biopic
The Whitney Houston Estate has been busy lately. Within the past year they’ve shared the music legend’s first posthumous single and teased a hologram tour. Now comes the next logical step: a biopic.
Houston’s estate announced today they’re developing a movie about her life story in partnership with her longtime Arista Records label head, Clive Davis, and former Arista employee Lawrence Mestel’s publishing and management company Primary Wave, which controls Houston’s catalog. The Photograph’s Stella Meghie is in advanced talks to direct, with a screenplay by Anthony McCarten, who wrote the smash-hit Queen biopic Bohemian Rhapsody and was nominated for Oscars for his work on The Theory Of Everything, Darkest Hour, and The Two Popes. Producers include Pat Houston on behalf of the Whitney Houston Estate, Davis, Mestel, McCarten, and Denis O’Sullivan, who also worked on Bohemian Rhapsody. The film is being independently financed and currently is not attached to a studio.
According to Davis, “From all my personal and professional experience with Whitney from her late teenage years to her tragic premature death, I know the full Whitney Houston story has not yet been told. I am so glad that Anthony McCarten has committed to a no holds barred, musically rich screenplay that finally reveals the whole Whitney whose vocal genius deeply affected the world while she fiercely battled the demons that were to be her undoing.” It will be interesting to see whether this “no holds barred” story will get into the childhood abuse alleged in 2018’s documentary Whitney, but given the Houston family’s response to those claims, don’t bet on it.