Kiss Biopic Explores ‘Social Pressures’ That Helped Them Form
Kiss manager Doc McGhee said the band’s biopic will explore the “social pressures” that helped shape the group during its first four years.
He predicted that casting for Shout It Out Loud – which will depict Paul Stanley, Gene Simmons, Ace Frehley and Peter Criss in their 20s – would start in the coming weeks.
“Actually, we have a script that's completely done,” McGhee told Talking Metal in a recent interview. “Mark Canton – who is a very, very powerful producer and production company … he was a president of Sony and all that, he's done 300 films … his team and Universal Music and ourselves have partnered up with Joachim Ronning, who is a very sought-after director that did things like Pirates of the Caribbean, and [his] Kon-Tiki was up for an Academy Award.”
McGhee noted that the "script is about the first four years of Kiss. Basically, it's before they were famous. … And 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 [under] in the '60s and '70s that brought something like Kiss to the forefront [so] that it could actually happen. So, it's a very interesting, and I think it's a well-written, movie. And our partners right now is Netflix. It'll be a theatrical release then Netflix.”
You can check out the interview below.
McGhee said some details remained to be worked out with distributors in the U.S. and Europe before the project moved to the next stage. “Then we'll get into casting,” he explained. “I believe before Thanksgiving we'll be in the casting.”
Talk of the Kiss biopic first surfaced last year, when McGhee said it would be released in July 2021, tying it to the band’s final show. The COVID pandemic forced plans to be changed, and the group just recently resumed its farewell tour.