After Michael and before the Beatles’ Quadrilogy, will the Rolling Stones also deserve a musical biopic? Mick Jagger has weighed in.
Following the blockbuster Bohemian Rhapsody ($911 million in worldwide box office on a budget estimated between $50 and $55 million), the musical biopic trend exploded across the industry: Rocketman, Elvis, Bob Marley: One Love, A Perfect Unknown, Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance with Somebody, Respect, Back to Black, Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere… the list goes on. Not every title met with success, and some even flopped spectacularly (for instance Better Man, the Robbie Williams biopic, which grossed $22.5 million against a budget of $110 million).
Yet the thunderous success of Michael by Antoine Fuqua (nearly $978 million in receipts on a budget estimated between $155 and $200 million) has probably rekindled financiers’ appetite to keep chasing this trend. It’s hard to doubt that Sam Mendes might view that as a favorable sign for his quartet of Beatles films. And clearly, the idea pipeline for more musical biopics isn’t running dry. Recently, Mick Jagger was asked about a possible film about the Rolling Stones.
(AUTO)SATISFACTION
In a long GQ feature dedicated to Mick Jagger, the rock ’n’ roll legend was asked whether a treatment akin to what Sam Mendes is doing with the Beatles would pique his interest. The Stones’ frontman answered without hesitation. The question, it seems, had already crossed his mind:
“Yes, I’m interested. I don’t necessarily want to impose my own vision, but I know how I perceive things. There are a thousand ways to tell a biopic. Most of the time, you focus on a short slice of the person’s life, framed by other elements. Take the Bob Dylan film: it concentrates on the moment he went electric. You have to decide what you want to spotlight. And which two-year window are we interested in? For Dylan, it was two years; the James Brown one I produced covered a somewhat longer span.”
Indeed, the singer and musician helped shape Get On Up, released in 2014, long before the current fever for music biopics. James Brown was portrayed by the late Chadwick Boseman, and the film didn’t perform as hoped, grossing about $33.4 million on a $30 million budget.
That wasn’t a box-office hit, but it underscores Mick Jagger’s enduring interest in cinema. Across his career, he has appeared in a number of films, perhaps most famously in Jean-Luc Godard’s One + One. So, which period of the Rolling Stones’ life would a musical biopic cover? Jagger’s query about the scope of the project seems to have stopped there:
“I don’t know which section to choose, because it’s a long period.”
The rock icon has even less of a sense about which actor might play his own role. That kind of uncertainty, as usual, leaves room for fans and cinephiles to play a game of “who would play him?” among friends. At any rate, Mick Jagger fans should get to see him on the big screen in 2027, in Three Incestuous Sisters by Alice Rohrwacher, which still has no release date.
