If you thought we were at peak biopic, you may have been wrong — as a new deal suggests you should probably expect many more films and documentaries about music legends in the future.  

Warner Music Group (WMG) is “close to an agreement” with Netflix to create movies and documentaries based on the company’s artists and songs, according to Bloomberg. WMG, which shut down its internal division that produced film and TV shows earlier this year and is looking to outsource that work, the report claimed.

Speaking at the Bloomberg Screentime conference on Wednesday (Oct. 8), WMG CEO Robert Kyncl did not confirm a pending partnership but laid out numerous reasons why the company should work with a global streaming platform. “Our company has a tremendous catalog: Prince, Madonna, Fleetwood Mac,” Kyncl said. “It just goes on and on and on. The stories we have are incredible, and they haven’t really been told. We’re like Marvel [Comics] for music.”

Kyncl, who as a Netflix executive helped the company launch its streaming service in 2007, added that “it makes a lot of sense for us to partner with a company that can bring it to life all around the world.” Netflix, which has more than 300 million subscribers in over 190 countries, would provide WMG with a massive audience for video content without the additional costs involved with theatrical releases.

Netflix has created numerous music-focused documentaries, including Martin Scorsese’s Rolling Thunder Revenue: A Bob Dylan Story; Miss Americana, a look at Taylor Swift’s career and personal life; Quincy, a history of celebrated producer and musician Quincy Jones; and Homecoming: A Film by Beyoncé.

Music biopics have become an increasingly popular piece of content as companies have invested billions of dollars in artist catalogs and name and likeness rights. The 2018 film Bohemian Rhapsody “turbocharged” demand for Queen’s catalog and played a role in its lofty $1.27 billion valuation when it was purchased by Sony Music in 2024. The 2022 film Elvis boosted the value of the late singer’s estate from $600 million in 2020 to $1 billion in 2022, a source told Billboard. Likewise, the upcoming Michael Jackson and Bruce Springsteen biopics could help Sony Music improve its return on its investments in those artists’ catalogs.  

But the time required to develop films means the payoff — synch royalties and increased streams and radio play — aren’t immediate. As Natalia Nastaskin, chief content officer at Primary Wave, told Billboard in 2024, that lag time could mean the peak of music biopics “may take several years.”

Piracy has become a hot-button issue in AI litigation ever since Anthropic reached a $1.5 billion settlement for torrenting books — but such claims won’t be part of the copyright infringement lawsuit brought by music publishers against the Claude chatbot maker.

Federal court records show that on Wednesday (Oct. 8), Judge Eumi K. Lee denied a motion by Universal Music Publishing Group, Concord Music and ABKCO Music to amend their 2023 lawsuit against Anthropic. The case centers on claims that Anthropic trained its large language model Claude on copyrighted song lyrics and now spits out copycat lyrics when prompted.

The music publishers asked in August to add piracy claims to the lawsuit, saying they’d recently learned that seven million books in Anthropic’s training arsenal were illegally torrented from online pirate libraries. The publishers said their intellectual property is likely part of this booty, including numerous music and lyrics compendiums and the sheet music to hits like Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer” and Ariana Grande’s “7 Rings.”

The publishers’ proposed amended complaint was part of a bigger trend in the dozens of AI copyright cases making their way through the court system. Plaintiffs have been focusing on piracy since a landmark June court opinion held Anthropic liable for storing torrented books, and the trend only intensified after Anthropic settled that case for $1.5 billion in September.

The major record labels, for example, are currently trying to amend their copyright lawsuits against AI music generators Suno and Udio with new stream-ripping claims. Suno and Udio say such allegations are legally bogus.

Anthropic opposed the amendment in the music publishers’ case as well, slamming the new claims as an improper attempt to “fundamentally transform this case at the eleventh hour.” The AI company said the publishers could have discovered their torrenting activity long ago, and that adding piracy claims now would unfairly delay the already two-year-old case.

Judge Lee ultimately sided with Anthropic. According to Bloomberg Law, the judge stated during a court hearing in San Jose, Calif., on Wednesday that the amendment is inappropriate because the publishers failed to properly investigate the piracy theory earlier.

The publishers’ lawyers declined to comment on the ruling on Thursday (Oct. 9). Anthropic’s reps did not immediately return a request for comment.

While Wednesday’s ruling is a loss for the publishers, they won a victory just a few days earlier when Judge Lee rejected Anthropic’s bid to trim down the original copyright infringement claims on Monday (Oct. 6).

Anthropic insists that training Claude on copyrighted material is fair use — a foundational tenet of copyright law that allows protected works to be recycled for “transformative” purposes, like news reporting or parody.

Whether or not AI training constitutes fair use is a hotly contested legal question that is still being hammered out by the courts. This issue is the subject of ongoing evidence discovery in the publishers’ case against Anthropic, which is scheduled to run through March.

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Crocs dropped a collection of official Wicked clogs last year to celebrate the first movie in the two-part film series. Now, fans have one more chance to pick up the coveted shoes with a surprise sale that discounts the Wicked x Crocs collab by 50% off.

Add a magical touch to your footwear rotation while expanding your Wicked merch collection when you throw on a pair of the Elphaba Clogs or platform Glinda Siren Crocs. They’re on sale now starting from just $35 online, with multiple sizes still available as of this writing.

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