No one wants to pit two powerful women against each other, but that’s kind of what will inevitably happen soon between these two A-listers.
Leading ladies Scarlett Johansson and Jennifer Lawrence will be thrown into an involuntary comparison battle in the near future, as the two stars are each slated to portray the late Zelda Fitzgerald in dueling biopics.
The Jazz Age icon and wife of author F. Scott Fitzgerald died nearly 70 years ago in a fire at a North Carolina hospital, but her life has been at the forefront of Hollywood’s inspiration as of late.
Just as Amazon rolls out its own series, Z: The Beginning of Everything, with Christina Ricci playing the “first American flapper,” films starring Johansson and Lawrence, respectively, are said to be on the fast-track to hitting the big screen. The films are said to dive into Fitzgerald’s personal life, portraying parts of her livelihood that may have been glazed over through history. Along with being a literary muse to her famous husband, she was an author herself, and struggled with her own madness (she was diagnosed with schizophrenia and institutionalized).
Lawrence’s project, called Zelda, is being spearheaded by renowned director Ron Howard. J.Law will also be reconnected with Hunger Games executive Allison Shearmur, who is producing. Emma Frost (The White Queen) wrote the screenplay, which is inspired by Nancy Milford’s best-selling biography of the same name.
Meanwhile, Johansson’s film is titled The Beautiful and the Damned, and is based on the F. Scott Fitzgerald classic of the same name, which illustrated the dynamics of his marriage to Zelda. The project has yet to snag a director, however, it does have one secret weapon up its sleeve.Millenium Films, which is financing the movie, secured the cooperation of the Fitzgerald estate, according to The Hollywood Reporter, and “will incorporate newly unearthed transcripts from a sanatorium in which Zelda Fitzgerald was confined that indicate her husband misappropriated his wife’s ideas as his own.”
While the premise of each film has been disclosed, production dates and slated release dates have yet to be determined.
Regardless, each film will become a blockbuster in its own right, thanks to their leading ladies. Both Lawrence and Johansson made it on Forbes’ annual list of highest-earning female movie stars for 2016
.
