Way back in 2022, we learned that Taylor Swift was going to direct a movie. As an actor, Swift has cobbled together a truly dire filmography over the years, appearing in pictures like Valentine's Day, The Giver, Cats, and Amsterdam. It's one of the few arenas in which she hasn't been phenomenally successful. But Swift had her sights set on directing, and she served the auteur for some of her music videos, including the hyped-up "short film" for her "All Too Well" re-recording. Searchlight Pictures was working with Swift to make this feature, which Swift would write and produce. Apparently, that's still happening.
Since that film project was announced in 2022, Taylor Swift has been extremely busy, releasing albums and embarking on the absurdly successful Eras Tour, which got its own blockbuster movie in 2023. If anything, Swift is even more famous now than she was when the movie was first announced. When things went quiet for years, I assumed that she'd abandoned the project. But Swift has big companies dying to work with her, and Searchlight is still working to develop this mysterious film project.
Today, Jeff Sneider's InSneider newsletter reports that Searchlight has tapped the British playwright Alice Birch to rewrite Taylor Swift's script. Birch previously served as a writer on TV shows like Succession and Normal People, and she created the short-lived TV version of Dead Ringers. Birch also co-wrote the indie films Lady Macbeth, Mothering Sunday, The Wonder, and The End We Start From, as well as Lynne Ramsay's forthcoming Jennifer Lawrence/Robert Pattinson picture Die My Love.
Sneider claims that Birch is "working closely" with Swift and that this is no indication that the studio has lost faith in Swift's vision: "Allowing more experienced writers to rewrite scripts is standard practice in Hollywood, so worry not, Swifties!" It'll probably be a long time before anything further happens with this movie, but development continues.
