Calling all Celine Dion superfans and francophiles around the world. The Canadian singer, five-time Grammy winner, and all-around icon has given her blessing—and the rights to her music—to French film studio Gaumont which will produce a $23 million biopic about her life.
Titled The Power of Love, the film will chronicle the superstar’s life growing up in Quebec in the 1960s, her surge to fame at the age of 12, and will touch on the relationship she had with her late husband and manager, René Angélil. French-Canadian actor Sylvain Marcel will play Angélil, while Valerie Lemercier will both direct and star as Dion.
Lemercier said that examining Dion’s relationship with her late husband and her mother, Thérèse, helped her recognize the story behind The Power of Love. “I discovered the strength of their love story and their great humor, and I better understood how the alchemy of their three individual ambitions made an unwanted, little girl the greatest star on the planet,” Lemercier told Variety.
Though Dion first emerged onto the music scene with several French-language albums, she quickly earned a fan base in the US in the 1990’s with English hits like “My Heart Will Go On” and “All By Myself,” which are promised to be featured in the film, along with an array of others. The legend has held a Las Vegas residency at the Colosseum at Caesars Palace, which will come to an end this coming June.
The news of the Dion movie comes after the enormous success of the recent Queen biopic Bohemian Rhapsody and the upcoming Rocket Man. Cécile Gaget of Gaumont stresses, however, that the film would be “in the vein of [both films] but unlike those movies which were produced and released by studios, The Power of Love is a potential box office hit accessible to independent distributors.”
Shooting for The Power of Love will take place in France for eight weeks in March, and will mainly be filmed in French. Thankfully, the release date won't be until December 2020, which gives non-native speakers just enough time to brush up on their Français.
