Beanie Feldstein previously appeared in the movie Lady Bird (2017), in which this musical is performed as the high school's fall show. Her character in that film was cast as the female lead in that play, just as she herself would later be cast as the same role in the actual movie in real life.
According to Ben Platt, the shooting schedule is already roughly sketched out, with Richard Linklater planning to follow the basic time line in the original script, which stretches from 1957 to 1976. They are treating each sequence as a short film.
Will be filmed over the course of 20 years, making the release date of the movie somewhere in 2040. Linklater used this method before when filming Boyhood, which took 12 years to complete.
When filming started in 2019, Blake Jenner was originally cast in the lead role of Franklin Shepard, and Linklater completed filming of the first sequence. But in 2020, after admitting to having physically and emotionally abused a former partner, Jenner was fired from the movie and replaced with Paul Mescal; the scenes that had already been filmed with Jenner as Shepard were re-shot with Mescal instead in late 2021-early 2022.
Production on this film was announced in mid-2019 and started filming later that year. An off-Broadway production of the musical started in late 2022 at the New York Theatre Workshop, starring Jonathan Groff (Franklin Shepard), Lindsay Mendez (Mary Flynn), and Daniel Radcliffe (Charley Kringas). This production, which received very positive reviews and blockbuster ticket sales, transferred to Broadway in fall 2023 with the same cast; all three leads received Tony nominations and Groff and Radcliffe won in their categories. Ben Platt, who plays Charley Kringas in this movie, was one of the two people who presented Radcliffe with his Tony for the same role; when Platt opened the envelope, the way he announced the winner was, "And the Tony award goes to . . . Charley Kringas himself, Daniel Radcliffe!"