By Brooks Barnes / New York Times News Service
Dead. Embalmed. Buried. A year ago, that is what most movie studios would have said about live-action musicals, pointing to a long line of box-office calamities: Rock of Ages, Burlesque, Jersey Boys, Across the Universe, Nine.
The few out-and-out successes in recent decades have been adaptations of Broadway classics (Les Misérables, 2012) or marketed in misleading ways. When 20th Century Fox was selling Baz Luhrmann’s hit Moulin Rouge! in 2001, the studio was so afraid that people would stay home if they knew it was a musical that the trailer rather awkwardly tried to avoid singing at all costs.
But Hollywood, excited in part by the critical and commercial success of La La Land, which cost Lionsgate $30 million to make and has taken in $132 million worldwide as it streaks toward the Academy Awards, is taking out its jazz hands again.
There are roughly 20 musicals in the works at studios, according to the film database IMDBpro. Some are live-action adaptations of classic animated musicals, like Beauty and the Beast, directed by Bill Condon and set for release by Disney in March. Others are films (among them, Wicked) based on contemporary Broadway hits.
Moreover, several studios—for the first time since the 1990s—are devoting meaningful resources to break-into-song films with original music. This year Fox will release The Greatest Showman, which stars Hugh Jackman as circus impresario P.T. Barnum; it has a dozen original songs. Disney has Bob the Musical, about a man whose life becomes filled with song after a head injury. Universal Pictures won a bidding war for an untitled musical comedy starring Josh Gad, with original songs by composer-lyricists Alan Menken and Stephen Schwartz.
There are several reasons for renewed studio interest, said Marc Platt, a La La Land producer whose other projects include an original song-and-dance film that will star Will Ferrell and Kristen Wiig and a sequel to Mary Poppins with a new score.
“Thankfully, as much as Hollywood is interested in brands, I think people are still looking for originality and freshness,” Platt said. “Musicals can also be their own brand: They have an event status. I also think the ceiling on the audience is lifting. You’ve got a new generation of fans who have grown up with television shows, like Glee.”
Platt added, “Music has a way of getting inside all of us and lifting us up.” Put another way, there is an inherent entertainment proposition in musicals, a heightened emotional experience that people go to the movies to find.
Platt, a former senior executive at Universal (and the father of Ben Platt, star of the hit stage production Dear Evan Hansen), has in many ways become Hollywood’s go-to producer of movie musicals. In 2014 he shepherded Disney’s adaptation of the Stephen Sondheim musical Into the Woods, which took in $213 million worldwide. As a major force behind Wicked on Broadway, Platt is working with Stephen Daldry (who directed the film version of Billy Elliot) to bring a movie version to theaters in 2019. “Yes, still on track,” Platt said of that long-gestating project.
Nothing fuels a Hollywood boom (or a boomlet, as the case may be with musicals) like a track record of success. And some studio executives said they were becoming more open to musicals because the animated variety had experienced such a renaissance. Frozen was a monster hit, selling $1.3 billion in tickets worldwide. Over the past few months, three animated musicals—Sing, Moana and Trolls—have taken in a combined $1 billion at the global box office. Disney will release a sing-along version of Moana (with lyrics on the screen, karaoke style) on January 27.
Some studios have also had recent success with pseudo-musicals, including films like Pitch Perfect that rely on pop hits and mostly keep the singing to stage settings. Television may also be giving film executives confidence; specials like The Wiz Live! and Grease: Live have reintroduced break-into-song entertainment to a mass audience.
Still, not everyone in Hollywood is convinced of a musical comeback. Kevin Goetz, chief executive of the film research company Screen Engine/ASI, said in an e-mail that he had no research indicating increased demand. “I think it’s a long shot to think that animated movies with music, which have been around for years now, have a material effect in increasing the desire to see live-action musicals,” he added.
If La La Land is an exception to the box-office rules, it is becoming quite an exception. On social-media sites, like Instagram and Facebook, young people—no prompting from Lionsgate, it promises—have been uploading videos of themselves singing “Audition” one of the film’s showcase numbers. During the past week, the soundtrack has shot up the sales charts.
La La Land, starring Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling as aspiring performers, won a record seven Golden Globe Awards on January 8, including one for Damien Chazelle’s directing and one for Justin Hurwitz’s score. Powered by that publicity pop, the film took in about $14.5 million over the weekend (its sixth in release) in North America. The producers of La La Land also include Jordan Horowitz and Fred Berger.
The weekend’s No. 1 film was the feel-good drama Hidden Figures, which collected a strong $20 million. Produced by Chernin Entertainment and Levantine Films and released by Fox, Hidden Figures has a domestic total after four weeks of about $54.8 million.