Television power-player Ryan Murphy is set to bring beloved Broadway musical The Prom to TV screens around the world, adapting the production for a "huge Netflix movie event".
Murphy, who is known for shows including American Horror Story, Glee and Pose, said that he was motivated to produce the movie in the lead-up to the 2020 US Presidential election in the hopes of “changing hearts, minds, and votes”.
Premiering in 2016, The Prom tells the story of a group of four down-and-out theatre actors who take it upon themselves to help a teenage girl whose school prom was cancelled when she tried to bring her girlfriend as a date.
Set in Indiana, Murphy's home state, the story struck a chord with the producer.
“I went [to prom] with my best female friend, and as a protest I wore six-inch yellow platform boots as a tribute to Bananarama, so I got a little radical renegade-ness in,” he said in an interview with Variety.
“But I was talking to the producer [Bill Damaschke] after the show, and I said, ‘I wish there had been something like this for me when I was that age so that I didn’t feel so alone.’”
The Prom will be Murphy's first piece of original content for Netflix after he signed a multi-year deal with the streaming platform last year.
