In November 1997 the Spice Girls released their second album, Spiceworld. Along with their first single from the album "Spice Up Your Life", as expected the album become a global best seller, and managed to set a record for the fastest-selling album over the first two weeks after it was released, shipping over 7 million copies. It gained mostly favourable reviews and sold over 10 million copies in Europe, US and Canada alone. However the album did get heavily critisised in the US for coming out so soon after their last album Spice, this caused a bit of backlash from the media across the world - partly due to the overexpose of the Spice Girls.

This resulted in diminishing international chart positions and heavy criticism about the number of sponsorship deals they signed. This didn't seem to have any effect on their overall popularity as they remained the biggest selling pop group across both 1997 and 1998. Three out of the Four further releases from the Spiceworld Album went on to become number ones, only "Stop" peaked at number two, and remains their only single not to go to number one in the UK. In June 1997 the Spice Girls started filming their first movie titles Spiceworld: The movie which was directed by Bob Spiers - who is more famous for Absolutely Fabulous and Fawlty Towers.

The Movie was meant to accompany the album, it has a very comical style and is very much in the same vein as The Beatles movies from the 60's. The film itself had a wide range of celebrities features in it including: Meat Loaf, Elton John, Rodger Moore and Jennifer Saunders. It was released in cinemas across the UK in December 1997 and proved to be a big box-office hit taking more than £11Million in Britain and $30Million in the US. The movie didn't get a good reception from the critics however, it was nominated for seven awards at the 1999 Golden raspberry Awards where it won the award for "Worst Actress". During November 1997 the Spice Girls fired their manager Simon Fuller, they said that he was controlling them far too much and was restricting their work and freedom, playing them against each other to achieve his goals.

After his dismissal the girls found it hard to manage themselves and nominated various members of the team to take over tasks, however they soon built their own team to take over the management affairs. In 1998 the Spice Girls went on a sold-out 102 date tour that covered Europe and North America, the tour itself started in Dublin, Ireland before going on to Europe and returning to Britain for fourteen dates at Wembley Arena and the NEC arena in Birmingham.

During an interview with This Morning in May 1998 the group confirmed a third Studio album which would be different to the two previous albums. It was intended to be made up of various solo and duet singles allowing the girls to experiment with their own styles and also allowing the girls to stay together as a band. Unfortunately due to the departure of Geri Halliwell the bands plans were forced to change and the album was never produced.

As the European tour was drawing to a close Geri Halliwell did not appear in the final two shows, the official word was that she was suffering from gastroenteritis . Rumours however started to circulate that Geri was planning to leave the group, the rumours were further fuelled when she missed a performance of "Viva Forever" that they played on the National Lottery show.