Netflix has announced that it will bring Britney Spears’ film Crossroads to the streaming world for the first time ever.
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Imagine this: double denim and butterfly hair clips are in style, Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck are together, and the coming-of-age movie Crossroads is about to be released to audiences who’ve never seen it. No, the year isn’t 2002 -- it’s all happening now, in 2024.
Following the story of three high schoolers who rekindle their friendship before college, Crossroads was Britney Spears' first leading role in a feature film, starring alongside actors Zoë Saldana and Taryn Manning. The film touches on serious topics like teenage pregnancy and parental abandonment while featuring Spears’ single, “I’m Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman.”
“Wow, we were so ahead of our time,” Crossroads director Tamra Davis told Variety in 2022. “With an African American screenwriter, me as a young female director, and all these women telling a story about women.”
Now that story will be told to an even larger audience, as Netflix announced it is set to release via stream. “The first movie to ever star the one and only Britney Spears has never been available on streaming… but that’s about to change!” Netflix said across their socials. “We’re thrilled to announce that 'Crossroads' will finally be available on Netflix — GLOBALLY — starting February 15.”
The date will mark exactly 22 years since the movie’s theater release back in 2002, when Spears was in the height of teenage stardom. The extreme success of “Oops…I Did It Again” and “Baby One More Time” propelled her to become the best-selling teenage artist of all time. This movie role, and her now infamous relationship with Justin Timberlake at the premiere, further added to her fame.
Since then, Crossroads has only resurfaced in theaters with the release of Spears’ autobiography The Woman in Me. In the book, Spears called her role as Lucy, “pretty much the beginning and end of my acting career.”
"I was someone else for months while I filmed Crossroads” she wrote. “Still to this day, I bet the girls I shot that movie with think, ‘She’s a little… quirky.’ If they thought that, they were right."
You can stream the movie via Netflix in the coming weeks, as soon as it is released one more time!