In a new interview with The Rock Experience With Mike Brunn, Doc McGhee, the longtime manager of American rock group KISS, gave an exciting update on the band’s forthcoming biopic movie, Shout It Out Loud. The movie is set to arrive on Netflix and will be directed by Joachim Rønning, the Norwegian filmmaker famed for his work on Kon-Tiki, Maleficent: Mistress Of Evil and Pirates Of The Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales. Meanwhile, Ole Sanders will take on scriptwriting duties.
“We’re just starting it now,” Doc told Mike Brunn. “We’ve already sold it. [The deal is] already done… So that’s moving along. And that’ll come in ’24.”
Last September, Doc revealed that Sanders’ script was “completely done,” adding, “Mark Canton, who is a very, very powerful producer and production company who has the TV series Power and Ghost and all that stuff, and he was a president of Sony and all that, he’s done 300 films — a really, really great guy — his team and Universal Music and ourselves have partnered up with Joachim Rønning, who is a very sought-after director that did things like Pirates Of The Caribbean, and Kon-Tiki was up for an Academy Award. And the script is about the first four years of KISS.
“Basically, it’s before they were famous — it was up to Cadillac High, that kind of thing,” he added, referring to KISS’ famous October 1975 performance in a high school gym in Cadillac, Michigan.
“I think it’s a very interesting look at the formation of KISS, the mindset of how that came about, the social pressure that everybody was in in the ’60s and ’70s that brought something like KISS to the forefront, that it could actually happen,” Doc continued. “So it’s a very interesting, and I think it’s a well-written movie. And our partner right now is Netflix. It’ll be a theatrical release, then Netflix.”
“Look, you get one chance to do it, and I would rather not do it than do it half-assed or poorly,” KISS frontman Paul Stanley told Download host Kylie Olsson last year when asked about the project. “Our director is the real deal. He did Maleficent 2, and he’s not some hack; he knows how to make movies. It should be great. Casting hasn’t begun yet. But that will be interesting too.”
“And I will tell you this: for casting to be accurate in terms of age, we are looking at actors in their early 20s,” he elaborated on the casting front. “Honestly, I don’t know a whole lot of actors in their early 20s. When people get asked these kinds of questions, they’ll say, ‘Oh, Brad Pitt,’ or this one or that one. Well, those guys are in their 50s or 60s, so you’re talking about another generation of actors. And I’m the first to say I’m not up on a lot of them. But as the casting process goes on, I’ll certainly be there and watching. It’ll be interesting to see how someone else — be it the casting people or the director — how they view who I am and who they see doing that. I think I’ll learn a lot about their perception of me by who they cast.”
