Green Day frontman Billie Joe Armstrong has said that the planned big-screen adaptation American Idiot have been “pretty much scrapped”.
The seminal album takes aim at the US’s involvement in the Iraq war. It charted at number one in nineteen countries and sold sixteen million copies worldwide.
In 2009, Michael Mayer adapted American Idiot into a Tony-winning musical. After its success on Broadway, in 2013 reports emerged that Tom Hanks would be producing a big-screen adaptation of the musical. A year later, playwright Rolin Jones was said to be “finishing up” the script.
HBO was said to have given the movie the go-ahead, with Armstrong reappraising his own Broadway role as St Jimmy. “We’ve got a green light from HBO, and the script is currently going through a couple of rewrites here and there, so I’m not sure when exactly we’re going to start shooting, but it’s definitely all systems go at the moment,” he told NME in 2016.
But after issues in development, Armstrong has said the project is on hold.
On 8 February, Armstrong spoke out about Donald Trump’s unlikely attendance at the musical’s opening night in New York. “At the beginning of American Idiot there’s a montage of all this pop-culture garbage, one being American Idol, and another was him saying: ‘You’re fired!’,” he told NME.
“So that’s the reason he came, because he’d heard that his face was going to be on the screen. He’s a sociopath, you know?”
