It was always going to be a tough ask for Marisa Abela (or any other actress for that matter) to play the late, great Amy Winehouse in a big Hollywood biopic about her life. Unfortunately, first impressions have not been great following the release of the first clip from ‘Back To Black’ earlier today…

I genuinely believe anyone involved in making this film should be arrested. pic.twitter.com/8A3WN7q07Z

— Bradley Stern (@MuuMuse) March 28, 2024

Oh dear. Here’s the general reaction online:

Can’t help but feel bad for Marisa Abela who is clearly a decent actress if you’ve seen HBO’s ‘Industry’, but for whatever reason it just doesn’t seem to have worked out here. You can see she’s trying really hard to imitate Amy’s style of missing, it’s just missing the mark completely.

Although in fairness, I don’t think there’s an actress on this planet who could do justice to Amy Winehouse’s vocals, which is obviously a big part of the movie. Couldn’t they have just used Amy’s original vocals or AI or something? I mean, the voice is one thing you absolutely have to nail in a biopic about a music legend of Amy Winehouse’s magnitude, but this seems more like someone taking the p*ss on SNL or something.

At the end of the day, Amy Winehouse is probably one celebrity who didn’t need their life story made into a movie, but then of course there’s no way Hollywood (or Amy’s dad) were ever going to leave that sort of money on the table, even if it now looks Back to Black is going to bomb spectacularly.

Never forget:

For the time Neil Patrick Harris faced backlash over his Amy Winehouse corpse cake, click HERE.