- Lance Armstrong’s hero-to-villain story has long fascinated sports fans around the world, and for the first time, he’s getting an official biopic starring Austin Butler.
- The upcoming feature will be written by Zach Baylin, and the production studio remains TBC.
- According to Deadline, the film will be “a cross between F1 and The Wolf of Wall Street.”
Lance Armstrong’s story is heading back to the big screen, and this time, it’s arriving with a proper Hollywood super-team attached to the project
According to reports from Deadline, Austin Butler is lined up to star in a new Armstrong biopic, with Edward Berger set to direct and Zach Baylin (the writer behind King Richard) on script duties. Scott Stuber and Nick Nesbit are producing alongside Berger, and the proposed biopic has kicked off a bidding war among major studios as they vie for the rights.
The big difference between this upcoming film and the 2015 movie The Program (starring Ben Foster) is that Armstrong has signed off on his life rights for the first time. Stuber has reportedly been chasing them for years, and made it clear he only wanted to do the film if it could tell the whole story: warts and all, without taking a soft-focus hero angle.
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After a long run of conversations, Armstrong agreed, with Baylin said to be speaking not only with Armstrong, but also others in his orbit, with “nothing off limits”. The film is expected to track the full arc of Armstrong’s legendary career, from the cancer survival and the seven consecutive Tour de France wins to the eventual admission to Oprah Winfrey of blood doping that brought the myth of his achievements crashing down.
The goal, reportedly, is something with the velocity of F1 and the full-throttle chaos of The Wolf of Wall Street. Love him, loathe him, this one’s going to be hard to ignore.
