Another nonfiction film about Britney Spears hoping to compete with the popular Hulu documentary “Framing Britney Spears,” as Netflix is working on its own project about the pop star.
According to Bloomberg, filmmaker Erin Lee Carr is directing her own nonfiction film about Spears for Netflix — a project that began prior to the debut of “Framing Britney Spears” earlier this month.
Carr is known for previously directing the Netflix miniseries “How to Fix a Drug Scandal” and the HBO documentary “At the Heart of Gold” about the scandal surrounding physician Larry Nassar and the U.S. Olympic gymnast team.
No other details were available about the specific focus of Netflix’s project, which Bloomberg said has not been completed and does not have an air date. Netflix had no comment. Representatives for Carr did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“Framing Britney Spears,” which comes from The New York Times and FX, focused on the pop star’s conservatorship controlled by her father, Jamie Spears, as well as the “Free Britney” movement surrounding her court battle. But the documentary also shines a light on how the media obsessed over Britney Spears for years and the often misogynistic narratives in the coverage that followed her. Attention about the documentary even led to Justin Timberlake, who once dated Spears, to issue an apology to both her and Janet Jackson for how he “benefited from a system that condones misogyny and racism.”
This would not be the first time that Netflix and Hulu have gone to war over buzzy documentaries. Both streamers released documentary films about the Fyre Festival within days of each other, “Fyre” and “Fyre Fraud,” both from 2019 about the 2017 music festival gone horribly wrong. The filmmakers even got in a war of words over the two documentaries, with one of the filmmakers accusing the others of paying Fyre Festival founder Billy McFarland $250,000 to secure him for an interview.
And of course there’s a gold rush at the moment over multiple documentaries and narrative projects all centered around GameStop and how a group of Reddit traders on r/WallStreetBets made waves on the stock market earlier this year.