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Bob Dylan. Amy Winehouse. Whitney Houston. Bob Marley. Elvis Presley. Priscilla. Judy. Rocketman. The list goes on. In the last few years, the music biopic has become its own genre—less about telling a story and more about rebranding a legacy.A Complete Unknown, the latest Dylan film starring Timothée Chalamet, landed in late 2024. Earlier that year, Back to Black promised to show the “real” Amy Winehouse. And like so many of these films, it didn’t. It couldn’t. Because in 2025, we’ve already seen the real story—or at least enough versions of it to be exhausted.
These films are coming faster, and feeling shallower. They follow a now-familiar formula: early genius, industry pressures, personal demons, a rise, a fall, and a final, mournful redemption. Swap the name, change the city, maybe add a cameo from a record executive played by someone famous. The outcome’s the same. What was once myth-making is now a Spotify-friendly screenplay.
The biopic boom wouldn’t feel so hollow if it weren’t happening in an era of digital saturation. We know too much. We’ve seen the archival footage. We’ve read the interviews, heard the leaked demos, dissected relationships on Reddit. By the time a biopic hits theaters, we already know the lines.
Take Back to Black. Marketed as a tribute, it filtered Amy’s story through the lens of her ex, Blake Fielder-Civil—a man many blame for amplifying her spiral. It felt less like a biography and more like a soft-focus attempt to rehabilitate an image. Fans hoping to see Amy on her own terms were left with a performance of a person, not a portrait.
This is the problem: these films aren’t about discovery. They’re about control. Control of the narrative. Control of the estate. Control of how pain gets packaged for box office returns. They’re not preserving history—they’re refining it for palatability.
There are exceptions—Rocketman took bold swings stylistically and emotionally. But most recent entries opt for safety. They confuse impersonation with depth, proximity with truth. They try to compete with the internet’s endless archive and always come up short.
The result? Biopic fatigue. Not because the stories don’t matter, but because the stories feel pre-chewed. We’re watching glossy reenactments of lives we already grieved—sometimes in real time, often more honestly than the movie version dares to go.
If there’s a future for the genre, it’s not in cleaner edits or better wigs. It’s in acknowledging what we don’t know. It’s in letting chaos, contradiction, and silence take up space. Or maybe it’s in stepping aside and telling different stories entirely—ones that haven’t already been monetized to death.