After spending years trying to work out the production details, Queen has announced they are finally moving forward on the Freddie Mercury biopic. The movie will be titled Bohemian Rhapsody and will star Rami Malek as Freddie Mercury. X-Men director Bryan Singer has been tapped to direct the film, which will feature the band’s historic performance at Live Aid in 1985. Queen members Brian May and Roger Taylor are listed as executive producers for the film.
“If you’ve ever seen Singer’s X-Men films, or the groundbreaking movie The Usual Suspects, you’ll know this is a director with extraordinary imagination and style,” the band said in a statement.
Queen has been working out the details for this project for about 12 years now, with Fox finally about to green light the finances for the movie. Brian May told Rolling Stone, “We’re very close.”
The delay for the movie was due to creative differences with former director Dexter Fletcher, who had originally cast Ben Winshaw as Freddie Mercury. Sacha Baron Cohen had been linked to the role of Mercury in the past but never ended up committing to the project.
This news comes only a week after it was announced that Queen and David Bowie have unreleased songs from their “Under Pressure” recording sessions. It has not been confirmed if those recordings will ever be released.
-Mark Goodwin, Music Correspondent
