Netflix is jumping on the #FreeBritney bandwagon.
Netflix to produce its own Britney Spears documentary
American streaming giants Hulu and Netflix have quite a history of competing projects. Back in 2019 (a.k.a. the Before Times), when we were all bathing in the pure schadenfreude that was the Fyre Festival disaster, both services dropped documentaries charting the infamous failed music festival's rise and spectacular fall. Hulu's Fyre Fraud debuted on January 14, and Netflix's Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened landed just four days later. Both were hugely successful, and it appears that, two years later, history is repeating itself thanks to none other than Britney Spears.
Hulu is getting a lot of press at the moment thanks to its ultra-popular (and extremely eye-opening) Framing Britney Spears documentary, and it seems Netflix is keen to get its own piece of the #FreeBritney pie. Erin Lee Carr, a true crime documentarian best known for the chilling HBO doco Mommy Dead and Dearest, is currently working on a project about the troubled pop star, according to Bloomberg.
Few details are known about Netflix's take, but it appears Carr had already been working on the documentary before Hulu released Framing Britney Spears. Given Hulu's success, it's a no-brainer for Netflix to do a similar deep dive into Spears' controversial conservatorship arrangement, which for the last 13 years has seen her father given control over her life, work and finances. Hulu's documentary not only provoked a massive response from viewers, but also members of the press responsible for the hundreds of harsh tabloid articles targeting the singer at the height of her fame. Even her former boyfriend Justin Timberlake has issued an apology, stating that he "benefited from a system that condones misogyny".
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