Scarlett Johansson is Looking to Star in a Competing Zelda Fitzgerald Biopic

Looks like stories about Zelda Fitzgerald are the next big trend in the entertainment industry. Yesterday, we wrote how Ron Howard is eying the director's chair on a Zelda movie with Jennifer Lawrence in the lead role, and now THR reports that Scarlett Johansson is developing a competing project that she'll star in.

Zelda has often been portrayed as little more than a socialite and the wife of famed writer F. Scott Fitzgerald, but she was a creative force to be reckoned with in her own right. In fact, the new Johansson movie, which is being called The Beautiful and the Damned after an F. Scott book titled The Beautiful and Damned, "has secured the cooperation of the Fitzgerald estate 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." That's a pretty big piece of info that the other movie likely won't be able to incorporate, so it looks as if Johansson's may offer a deeper, more realistic portrayal of Zelda's life. Hanna Weg (Septembers of Shiraz) is writing the screenplay.

This is all in addition to Amazon's new series Z: The Beginning of Everything, which has Christina Ricci on board to play the Jazz Age icon. We've seen trends like this happen before in Hollywood, and it's as if one person's good idea suddenly sparks a massive wave of interest and has people off to the races to tell the story first on the big screen. We'll have to wait until the dust settles to see which (if any) of these projects is hailed as the definitive portrait of a woman who spent most of her life overshadowed by her husband.

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