Movie musicals-a dying breed?

I love musicals whether theyre on stage or in a film but is it just me or are they dying out. Even in animation they seem to be few and far between.

Does it bother anyone else that an entire film genre is dying out?

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Musicals have been dead for years, how are you just noticing this?

It seemed as though they might have a bit of a rebirth in Hollywood the past few years with the success of Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge! and the Award-winning triumphs of Chicago. But nothing has come close to being a hit in the few attempts since then. I loved the film version of the stage version of Mel Brooks' The Producers, but it was a bomb at the box office. This summer's Idlewild proved to be a bust, too. I thought Kenneth Branagh's Musical take on Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost was wonderful, but it couldn't even crack a million bucks in ticket sales. Rent was made about ten years too late and was just silly. They finally made Andrew Lloyd Webber's Phantom of the Opera into a film, and nobody much cared. The film version of the stage version of John Waters' Hairspray is the next major release coming, and if that too is a box office failure you can pretty well consider the positive effect Chicago might have had to be all spent up, as far as the Studio executives are concerned.

As far as Disney and the animated Musical, when they had played out that string with the relative disappointments of Pocahontas and The Hunchback of Notre Dame by the mid-'90s and then the non-Musical PIXAR projects started becoming far and away more popular, that spelled the end of that second era of Musical feature-length cartoons at the Mouse House. They'll probably float one or two down the line and see if they hit, but it obviously isn't a priority. When crap like Shrek 2 can make a zillion bucks, why bother with trying to make a Musical?


One day somebody will make a successful Musical again - successful financially and critically, and a bunch will crop up in its wake. But until then, this dated and played-out genre will remain dead. It's really been dead since the last heyday of the 1960s with only a few blips in the decades since like Cabaret, Grease and Chicago and the Disney Musical cartoons of the first half of the '90s. For the rest of Hollywood history you can count on nothing but the ocassional blip every once in a while. Musicals will never be a dominant genre again.

Deal.


But hey, check out Bollywood. They still adore the Musical in India.

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if musicals have been dead for years, why did you continue to name ones made so recently. My point was that during the 30's and onward through the sixties they seemed to be cracking out musicals left right and centre. how come we dont make them as much anymore? Yes there have been a few modern successes but not nearly enough. Recent outings like Romance and Cigarettes went by without a blip, i just think back to my old favourites and think that we could do with some more of them.

And harking back to my fairly recent childhood, im only 18, i miss disney musicals and i wish to god that theyd make more ones like beauty and the beast, the little mermaid and peter pan.

I thought I explained that, no? Every once in a great while there will be a Musical that is an across the boards success, like Grease in the late '70s and Chicago in the first part of this century. When that rare one breaks through, the Studios will all say, 'Hey, maybe we should try and cash in on this and make a quick Musical or two ourselves?' In the wake of these very rare successes, up will spring a handful of others in the two or three years afterwards. When most of them fail to make money, as they usually do, it goes right back into a period of only one or two Musicals showing up every two or three years. Most of those will fail. In another eight or ten or twelve years when one of them manages to break through like Cabaret or Chicago, again you'll see a bunch put quickly into production. And thus, the pattern is doomed to repeat itself.

If you think the Studios are ever again going to schedule two or three Musical a year, year in and year out, you're insane. The biggest Broadway hits, those that aren't just revivals or reworkings of existing movies, will continue to be made with irregularity (how many years before Phantom and Evita finally came to the screen? Still no Les Miserables or Cats, the giant hits of the past twenty-five years). Most of them will fail. And so it goes.

As for Romance & Cigarettes, Dancer in the Dark and other dark exercises like Pennies from Heaven, these are twisted deviations on the Musical, pitch-black satires that use the dead form as ironic juxtaposition. They're even more rare than the Musicals that play it straight, and I don't forsee one of them ever being "successful" in the mainstream sense.


The Hollywood Musical had its run from the 1930s through the 1960s. It's dead. So are Westerns, which had their best run from the 1940s to the 1970s. Musicals and Westerns still get made from time to time, but they will never ever be the mainstream norm again. To answer your original question, no, it doesn't bother me that these two genres, or any other genre, dies out. The old movies don't go away, after all.

I think the critical and box office success of Chicago did a lot for sort of revitalizing the movie musical as film. I know Rent didn't do that well (but I still liked it.) And Dreamgirls is supposed to br amazing. I dont think it's over at all!

After recently watching The Phantom of the Opera and The Producers, I realize I havn't seen nearly enough musicals. I guess it's lucky for me that I havn't been watching them because if I had I would have seen all the ones that have come out and would be disappointed that there aren't many more being produced.

I'm not a fan of musicals whatsoever. I just don't find the singing and dancing entertaining. It really is personal opinion so don't bother debating me on why but I rather those movies with the action, comedy; more mainstream genres.

But movies like Dreamgirls, Ray and Walk the Line, they aren't Musicals with a capital M. They're dramas that feature characters who are singers and make music, where all the music happens on stage and such. The Musical is a form, where dialogue and feelings are sung and danced and no comment is made in the reality of the movie that there is singing and dancing going on. THAT is the form that has been dead since the 1960s when the likes of West Side Story, The Sound of Music, The Music Man, Mary Poppins, Oliver!, Doctor Doolittle, Funny Girl, Hello, Dolly! and My Fair Lady were still box office champs and Oscar nominees, year in and year out.

In the past thirty-five years there have been exactly six Musicals nominated for Best Picture: Fiddler on the Roof (1971) [which can really be seen as the tail end of that '60s cycle], Cabaret (1972), All That Jazz (1979), Beauty & the Beast (1991), Moulin Rouge! (2001) and Chicago (2002), and Chicago was the only one to win. In the eight years before that from 1961 to 1969 there were nine Musicals nominated for Best Picture, and four of them (West Side Story, My Fair Lady, The Sound of Music and Oliver!) won Oscar's top prize. There will never, ever be another period like that in Hollywood where big budget mainstream Musicals are made with regularity, never will we ever see multiple Studios with multiple projects on the calendar every year. Never.

Though it didn't get nominated for any big Oscars (only one for Original Song, which it lost), Grease was the big smash hit of 1978. Hugely popular, the box office champion of the year...and it wasn't even close between it and second place. So of course Hollywood decided to put a bunch of Musicals into production again, even though they had stopped being profitable since the 1960s. And what was the result? Crap. Crap that lost money. In the three or four years after Grease we got such gems as Xanadu (1980), Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1978), Can't Stop the Music (1980), Annie (1982), The Wiz (1978), Popeye (1980), The Pirate Movie (1982), Yentl (1983) and of course Grease 2 (1982).

In that period, All That Jazz (1979) was the only Best Picture Oscar nominee, and it's a very dark and adult take on the form and hardly what somebody raised on Seven Brides for Seven Brothers and Finian's Rainbow would immediately embrace as a Musical. Victor/Victoria (1982) got a bunch of nominations (seven total) without getting into the Picture or Director category and did decent business. The only one to really be a good-sized hit during this time, though nothing like the amazing take of Grease, was The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (1982), which more-than-respectably finished in the middle of the pack of the top ten for domestic box office that year.

But the horrible and financially ruinous projects far outweighed the praised and profitable ones, and so for the next fifteen years or so you basically get no Musicals coming from the mainstream Studios...except for the new wave of animated Disney Musicals that started with The Little Mermaid (1989). There was A Chorus Line (1985) which didn't do anything, Little Shop of Horrors (1986) which deserved a better fate than it got (though being so dark and mixing so many genres didn't give it much hope for a big mainstream success) and Newsies (1992) which was just embarassing, but other than that Hollywood doesn't touch the Musical. There are some low-budget and off-center entries like Absolute Beginners (1986) from the U.K., Spike Lee's School Daze (1988), John Waters' Cry-Baby (1990) and Top Secret! (1984) with a couple of parody sequences, but none of them do anything to change Hollywood's attitude toward the genre, either.



In 1996 they finally tried it again with lots of money and Madonna as Andrew Lloyd Webber's Evita, but that was a disaster on multiple levels, and though it managed to wrangle five Oscar nominations on the technical side, it was definitely not the return of the Hollywood Musical.The suprise critical and popular response to Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge! in 2001 was twenty-three years after Grease was a smash and nineteen years after The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas finished in the top ten. And not that Moulin Rouge! was even a finacial success on that kind of level, because though it did good business for a Musical, it didn't even finish in the top 40 in the U.S. box office for 2001. But it did definitely get some big Oscar nominations, and so it resulted in a few more being put into production again, including Chicago. Chicago finished in the number ten spot for the year, grossing an impressive $170-million domestically with thirteen Oscar nominations and six wins, including Best Picture. But as I detailed in the other post, that has simply not led to another success even close to that level (how did From Justin to Kelly work out? I forget).

Which is why Musicals are dying out again, and why they've really been dead since the 1960s.


You can keep hoping for a major Hollywood rebirth if you like, but it just ain't gonna happen. Seriously though, check out Bollywood. You may well get into it, and then you'll have hundreds of movies to catch up on. And they're still cranking them out every year.

I agree with you Holden on musicals in the movies......but what I'm finding interesting is the recent trend of movies being reworked and made into musicals for the stage, lke....Spamalot (Monty Python and the Holy Grail), Light in the Piazza, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. I'm wondering what else the broadway community is planning on turning into a musical.


Undecoverlover...as far as your question...

"Does it bother anyone else that an entire film genre is dying out?"
Actually...no. I'd rather see a musical produced and done really well every few years like Chicago, than have the genre suddenly become popular again. I could easily see musicals fall into that family movie trap with the studios cranking out a movie for a quick buck instead of taking the time and loving care to make it special. Of course, I'm probably being a tad bit pessimistic. The vision I'm having right now....the influx of pop divas on the wide screen...more of Jessica Simpson...oooo..dear...

And don't forget the Broadway Musical stage versions like The Lion King, Beauty and the Beast, Sunset Boulevard, Kiss of the Spider Woman and The Goodbye Girl from the '90s, long before the recent Tony triumphs of Hairspray, Spamalot and most obviously The Producers.

Billy Elliott, which has already opened in the U.K., is coming to Broadway. John Waters is having another go with Cry-Baby and Mel Brooks has been playing with the idea of adapting Young Frankenstein. I heard a rumor about Midnight Cowboy making the transition, but I hope that one stays a rumor ("I'm walkin', here! I'm walkin', here! Can't you see I'm walkin', here? I limped from there and no one sees, it's just me and my fantasies..."). I believe Shrek, Legally Blonde, Nine to Five, High Fidelity, The Wedding Singer, The First Wives Club and Catch Me If You Can are all in various stages of development. I've heard rumblings about The Princess Bride, as well.

And Disney has a new crop of adaptations from their stuff, too, including The Little Mermaid and Mary Poppins (which has already opened in London). A take on their cartoon version of Tarzan opened last year, though it was no Lion King.


And on the stage-to-movie end, there will be one more to pin your hopes on after the re-adaptation of Hairspray!: Tim Burton and Johnny Depp are teaming for Sweeny Todd, which should hit the screens sometime in late 2007. But the material is so dark and Burton is so off-center, I don't forsee that one breaking through for a Chicago-like mainstream, box office and awards success.

Time will tell.

Now they make movies into musicals for the stage. Like The Evil Dead. Can't wait to see that one.

I don't like musicals.

Now I say this despite the fact that I really liked "Chicago."

But for the most part -- ugh. Didn't like "Grease," was bored by "The Sound of Music." Roll my eyes when the singing starts in any Disney movie.

I just don't get it. I don't condemn other for liking them -- because my wife does. But you're not going to find a shoulder to cry on with me because musicals are a dead art form.

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I would have to agree that the only one I liked was Natural Born Killers oops I mean Chicago. hehe

disney movies used to be amazing, up until the little toy story
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the last great disney one was lion king
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no movie musical has been great since the lion king.
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if you mean live action, then ionno, wicked's gonna come out soon isn't it?
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if it does, it will blow all other non-animated movie musicals out the water

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www.myspace.com/audryesessions -imagine the holocaust, they are the complete opposite of that!, haha
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check em all out

Yeah, I don't think we'll be seeing a rejuvenation of the genre any time soon and I've never really been a big movie-musical fan. But since it seems there are one or two released every year anyway, I would like to see more of them model themselves after Once. I think that would be a cool direction for these kinds of films to take. Instead of breaking into random elaborate musical numbers, how about trying for a little realism? Integrating the songs into the film gracefully and naturally. Once is a wonderful, low-key musical that worked perfectly without having to resort to obvious, bombastic sequences which only end up being distracting for me. If musicals do make any sort of mini-comeback in the near future, I hope they go about their business in this kind of organic and believable fashion.

Though, what about Enchanted? That is worth noting, I believe.

I loved Once, but I liked Hairspray and Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street even more. Of course, "musicals" don't distract me with their technique. I'd like to see as many different kinds that they're able to produce, as long as they're done well.

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I don't think musicals are dying at all. Actually I feel that the musical genre is growing. With such films as Enchanted, Across The Universe, Hairspray, and Sweeney Todd which IMO were all worth seeing and were pretty popular I see more to come in the future.

the only popular musical films left are High School Musical and Hairspray, isn't it a musical too?