Bradley Cooper’s Leonard Bernstein Biopic Heads To Netflix

Bradley Cooper’s followup to A Star is Born, a biopic of legendary composer Leonard Bernstein, is headed to Netflix. The film was originally set up at Paramount, and as we’ve seen many times in the past, when they’ve got a project that looks like a commercial failure, Netflix is usually eager to take it off their hands.

Cooper will co-write, direct, and star in the film on Bernstein, the composer known for his scores for West Side Story, Candide, Peter Pan, and many more. The respect for Bernstein has attracted some of Hollywood’s greatest filmmakers as producers, including Martin Scorsese, Todd Phillips, and Steven Spielberg.  The Bernstein estate has been working closely with Cooper, as well.

Variety says “The film will span over 30 years, telling the story of the marriage between Bernstein and his wife, Felicia Montealegre.” 

This is just the latest example of Paramount and Netflix’s close business relationship, which began when the streaming giant saved them from a potentially disastrous release of The Cloverfield Paradox. They would later take international distribution on high-concept sci-fi film Annihilation, which went on to bomb domestically, by the way. Most recently they scored Beverly Hills Cop 4, when all of the franchise’s previous films were released by Paramount.