Hollywood bidding war erupts over Lance Armstrong biopic with Austin Butler set to play cycling’s most polarising figure

A major Hollywood bidding war has broken out around a biopic of Lance Armstrong, underlining how powerfully the most controversial name in cycling history still resonates far beyond the sport that cast him out.

The project, which will see Austin Butler, famous for playing Elvis in the 2022 biopic, portray Armstrong, has attracted intense studio interest at the package stage, a rare signal of confidence in a story many within cycling would rather leave untouched. For filmmakers, Armstrong remains compelling material. For cycling, his legacy remains far more uneasy.

Armstrong’s rise was not simply a run of Tour de France victories, but a period of total control. Between 1999 and 2005, he dominated the Tour to such an extent that entire teams recalibrated their ambitions around second place. His US Postal Service squad set new standards for tactical discipline, preparation and mountain control, reshaping how Grand Tours were raced.

Coupled with his highly publicised comeback from advanced cancer, Armstrong became the most powerful figure the sport had ever produced. He drove unprecedented commercial growth, pulled American audiences into the Tour de France, and influenced training and team structures across the peloton.

Those years were foundational. They left a mark on cycling that extended well beyond his own results.

The collapse was equally definitive. Following the 2012 USADA investigation and a public admission of doping on the Oprah Winfrey show, Armstrong’s seven Tour titles were stripped in full, and his lifetime ban was imposed. Unlike other riders from the same era, there was no path back into the sport, no gradual re-entry through media or management roles.

Cycling drew a hard line. Armstrong was not just sanctioned, but excluded, becoming a fixed point in the sport’s past rather than a voice within its present. That decision shaped how professional cycling attempted to rebuild credibility and distance itself from its most damaging chapter.

Armstrong’s story has already been told through investigation and exposure, most notably in The Program, which mirrored cycling’s own need to dismantle the myth.

This new project is positioned very differently. With Edward Berger directing and Zach Baylin attached, the focus is expected to shift towards character, power and belief rather than evidence and procedure. That approach, combined with Armstrong’s life rights now secured, explains why studios see this as prestige material capable of sustaining a bidding war.

For cinema, the scandal is settled. What remains is a study of dominance and collapse at the very top of sport.

For cycling fans, the discomfort lies not in revisiting old verdicts, but in watching one of the sport’s most divisive figures re-enter the spotlight through a medium that operates on very different terms.

Armstrong no longer belongs to professional cycling in any meaningful way. Yet the scale of Hollywood’s interest shows his story still carries extraordinary weight beyond it. The bidding war itself is the clearest indication that, even years after his exclusion, Armstrong remains impossible to ignore.

That tension between cycling’s desire to move on and cinema’s eagerness to look back is exactly why this biopic matters, and why it will land so awkwardly within the sport that produced him.