Everyone hates movie musicals, right?
Well, this list of critically acclaimed musicals that have won big at the Oscars—think Chicago, or The Sound of Music, or even La La Land, which lost Best Picture but still took home half a dozen Academy Awards—seems to tell a different story.
So, of course, musicals are not inherently worse than other films, or even inherently disliked by the mainstream. But movie musicals in the past decade—at least the ones that haven’t been successfully converted into proshots—have been struggling to reach this same historical level of audience and critical acclaim. Is the genre dying off, or is there a tangible solution to save it?
The desire to turn musicals into movies is an understandable one. Broadway is inaccessible, especially to the young artists who, while they live in New York and dream of making it onto the big stage, can’t afford the luxurious tickets to the heart of their own industry. Adapting these musicals for the screen makes a lot of sense, then: They’re easier to churn out when screenwriters are working from a play script; producers can hike up box office numbers with big–time Hollywood names; and fans of the Broadway show, who before would only have had access to the album or grainy bootlegs, are able to pay less than 20 bucks to go see the movie with their friends.
In theory, this formula is fantastic, but it clearly has not been working in practice. The producers of these adaptations often don’t understand the soul of the show they’re translating to the big screen, nor what they should adjust so that the story can thrive within a cinematic context.
It’s important to note that musicals that were written for the screen don’t face as much public vitriol. Examples here include the majority of animated Disney content, the theater kid’s understated darling that is tick, tick… BOOM!, and, once again, Damian Chazelle’s La La Land. A director like Chazelle ultimately understands how to enclose crucial elements of the genre—the sweeping musical numbers, the intricate interaction of camera movement and choreography, and the suspension of disbelief where dialogue becomes lyrics—inside of a film, and that is what separates an original movie musical from a lazy adaptation.
Because I’ll tell you a secret: A good movie musical can melt the heart of even the most jaded film bro. A good musical is pure campy joy, set in a world where everything is just a little more whimsical and bright simply because people break into song at a moment’s notice. (Besides, it’s hard to take a film connoisseur seriously if they express a strong disdain for musical theater. Cinema is theater, it just happens to be better funded.)
Three recent musicals stand out as examples of failed attempts at movie adaptations of musicals. The Prom tells the story of a lesbian teenager in Indiana who gains attention from a troupe of washed up Broadway actors when she’s prohibited by her school from taking her girlfriend to the prom. The film had a brief theatrical run in 2020 before heading straight to Netflix streaming. With musical–comedy powerhouse Ryan Murphy at the helm, it was disappointing that the film felt muted, lackluster, and morally hypocritical. The mocking, disingenuous performances of beloved characters felt like an annoying slap in the face to LGBTQ viewers and distorted the original show’s strong message of acceptance and humility. The Prom left critics and fans alike wishing that the creative team had prioritized preserving the authentic soul of the original … and begging casting directors across Los Angeles to delete James Corden from their contact lists.
Dear Evan Hansen is about an anxious teenager who, under false pretenses, becomes close to the family of a former classmate who has recently died by suicide. The film adaptation, directed by Stephen Chbosky, premiered in theaters in 2021, and the unpopular, nepotistic choice of casting Ben Platt as the title character instantly raised eyebrows. Platt’s stage performance should have stayed separately immortalized, because up close and personal with the camera, the 27 year old was jarringly out of place in a high school setting.
By not choosing a younger actor, Chbosky faced an uphill battle against delicately portraying the complicated beats of the story itself, which, borderline glorification of suicide entirely aside, relies heavily on Evan’s childish naivety and sympathetic relatability to ultimately redeem his months of lying and deception. The story in Dear Evan Hansen is less theatrical spectacle and more dark emotion, and therefore could have done very well as a film, but ended up as a cautionary tale about poor creative judgment.
The third recent musical adaptation is, of course, the impossible–to–escape 2024 winter phenomenon that was Mean Girls, which, if you live under a rock, is a classic teen comedy about a formerly homeschooled girl who falls in with the most popular crowd in her new high school. The confusing promotion leading up to the release banked on accruing nostalgia for Tina Fey’s 2004 flick, while being intentionally vague about the film’s musical content. Fans of the show felt like everything other than Renee Rapp’s reprise of her Regina George role was a pale imitation of the show’s ridiculously endearing Broadway glory, and everyone else landed somewhere on the spectrum of confused to annoyed when characters started singing out of nowhere.
The pattern is clear. Beloved musicals end up hurtling down the well–trodden path of film adaptation, where the teams behind them blow money on marketing, tarnish the reputation of the show, and anger both fans of the original and the greater mainstream audience as a whole.
So, what to do? While it’s not impossible to adapt a musical well (for example, I, among others, find myself cautiously optimistic about the upcoming Wicked movie), the future of this genre seems to lie in proshots.
A proshot is a professional and multicameral production of a live performance, which can then be distributed online or sold to a streaming service. This is what happened when Disney+ bought Hamilton in 2020. There was no concern of the Hamilton proshot relinquishing any of the magic of the original show, because it displays a higher–quality, more easily accessible version of exactly what one would see in the theater, despite not actually being there.
The success of Hamilton has inspired a slew of other proshots of beloved musicals, including Waitress and Kinky Boots. Proshots have no obligation to adjust the original Broadway cast in regard to age, willingness, or optics, and, while not cheap to produce, are overall far less of a financial undertaking than films. This will only become more true the more creative resources are allocated away from movie adaptations and into this community–endorsed, authentically theatrical proshot world.
One theater blogger astutely states, “For anyone who grew up watching proshots, we know they can’t limit the audience theater has. They expand it.” When stage musicals are locked up in a kitschy New York sphere, theater fans have to seek the content out on their own. But the emergence of widespread proshots might be able to make new musical–theater lovers out of former movie musical haters … and they won’t need a buzzy CGI trailer or an A–list celebrity cast to do it.
