Can Big Screen Musicals Pump Up the Box Office ?
With films from Lin-Manuel Miranda, Bill Murray, Todd Haynes, Leos Carax and others, the Cannes Film Festival, movie theaters and streamers are alive with the sound of music. It might just be the shuffling of release dates as a result of the pandemic, but 2021 is shaping up to be an embarrassment of riches for fans of movie musicals, Miranda says. And he should know. Since last years successful Disney Plus release of his Pulitzer Prize-winning show Hamilton, Miranda has become a movie musical industry unto himself. With films from his 5000 Broadway Prods., he just had a five-borough Tribeca Festival premiere of In the Heights (adapted from his 2008 Tony-winning Broadway show) and is directing his first musical feature  Jonathan Larsons pre-Rent show tick, tick  Boom!  in theaters and on Netflix this fall. Miranda also stars in and wrote original songs for Sony Pictures Animations musical Vivo (on Netflix this summer), co-wrote and stars in the Disney animated musical Encanto (in theaters Nov. 24) and is producing and writing new music for Disneys live-action remake of The Little Mermaid, now in production. After Cannes opens with Caraxs operatic musical Annette, there are plenty more musicals coming to cinemas (Stephen Chboskys Dear Evan Hansen on Sept. 24, Steven Spielbergs West Side Story on Dec. 10, Joe Wrights Cyrano on Dec. 25) and streamers (Cinderella and Everybodys Talking About Jamie on Amazon Prime Video in September, Come From Away on Apple TV Plus this fall). Popular on Variety  Amidst Hollywoods reliance on bankable IP, from reboots to sequels to comic book fare, musicals are one of the few remaining genres able to attract big budgets for creative and original projects, offering enough audio-visual appeal to draw audiences back to theaters. The first time I watch a musical, I want to see it on the biggest screen possible to take in the spectacle, the depth and details, Miranda says. I love to hear the applause, laughter and gasps from a packed movie house. But I also love the home rewatch  going right to my favorite sequences.  He found that directing tick, tick  Boom! was not easy, especially during a pandemic! But it has taught me humility and respect for  all my film mentors. Ive been incredibly fortunate learning from the best  Rob Marshall on Mary Poppins Returns, Tommy Kail on Hamilton and Fosse/Verdon and Jon M. Chu with In the Heights. Seeing how they did it was incredibly inspiring and invaluable. I hope I make them proud.  Whether its a Broadway adaptation, a biopic such as Liesl Tommys Aretha Franklin tale Respect (in theaters Aug. 13) or a doc like Haynes out-of-competition Cannes entry The Velvet Underground (in theaters and on Apple TV Plus this fall), musical films are often buoyed by a pre-established following and an added element that draws in audiences. Music captures our memory, our sense of time and place, and links up with our experiences in a way thats hard to find any comparable example of, Haynes says. His films (from Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story to Im Not There to Velvet Goldmine, which won a 1998 Cannes Special Jury Prize for artistic contribution) often feature it prominently, so making his first doc about the Lou Reed/John Cale-led band was a natural move. [Andy] Warhol basically said, Im giving up painting to make movies. Because underground cinema and the 60s avant-garde had such a presence in and around this band, we have the most amazing and unique way to tell this story. Haynes included never-before-seen performances and experimental art to put you back in that time, using layeredand multi-screen [images].  After hitting fall fests, it will be released with some similarly innovative promotions. And more mainstream 60s rock fans can get their fix when a re-envisioned, expanded version of Let It Be, Peter Jacksons doc The Beatles: Get Back, hits theaters Aug. 27. Next year, Haynes will capture a different music legend, Peggy Lee, in his Michelle Williams-toplined biopic Fever. Its anchored around Lees famed  1961 shows at New York Citys Basin Street East and her 1969 Las Vegas comeback. She [had] a kind of gauzy, romantic, ironic way that she told her romantic narratives in concerts, he says. All of those devices are rich opportunities visually.  The $903 million worldwide gross of 2018s Bohemian Rhapsody and the $195 million worldwide B.O. of 2019s Rocketman proved audiences will turn out for music biopics. And their soundtracks appeal can take even a slow B.O. starter such as 2017s The Greatest Showman to a $434 million worldwide gross. Studio marketers are also taking a cue from stage musicals that use cast albums, promotional YouTube videos and conventions such as BroadwayCon to create followings for shows that havent even opened. Chboskys high school drama The Perks of Being a Wallflower and his screenplay adaptations of Rent and Beauty and the Beast made him the ideal choice to bring the tale of isolated teen Evan Hansen to cinemas. I admired the book by [the films screenwriter] Steven Levenson and the songs so much, but I knew it was going to be very tricky, because its not a traditional musical with a bunch of dance numbers, he says. It takes place in dining rooms and bedrooms. The most important aesthetic that we build the entire shoot around was capturing [Tony-winner] Ben Platts live performance, and its almost entirely sung live on set.  Some new musicals like Hansen, Heights and Boom! seem more personal than most earlier ones. I hope [Heights] inspires future writers to tell their own stories, either on film or on stage, Miranda says. And this approach could be one reason more of them are coming to the screen. Bigger talent and better roles can now be found on Broadway  thats why these adaptations are happening, Chbosky says. It also feels like this generation is telling more personal stories, so the writing is following that. You could link it to TikTok, YouTube Music is being tied to social media, and its becoming a diary of sorts for [our] entire society.  Though its billed as a musical, Annette is more of an opera. The films music producer, Marius de Vries (La La Land), says it originated as a concept album from Sparks, whose Ron and Russell Mael approached Carax. Leos surprised them by saying, Id like to make this my next project, he says. The authorship of all of the music in the film is Sparks, and the lyrics are by Leos. Though theres no screenplay credit for the fatalistic romance between a performance artist/comedian (Adam Driver) and an opera singer (Marion Cotillard), who have a prodigy daughter, de Vries says the screenplay is effectively the libretto of the songs. It hits a few U.S. theaters Aug. 6 and Amazon two weeks later. But even commercial musicals can be a risky proposition: the last two to open before the pandemic were the animated Frozen 2 (grossing $1.4 billion worldwide) and Cats (just $74 million worldwide). Musicals have been one of the most popular genres over time, says Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst for Comscore. And I think were seeing a bit of a renaissance of people wanting to have that experience in a theater [because] of the big screen and the sound quality.  Heights, the first musical released in theaters as the U.S. pandemic subsided (and streaming on HBO Max with no surcharge), had a $11.5 million domestic opening weekend, about as much as the all-star, only-in-theaters sequel The Hitmans Wifes Bodyguard earned the following weekend. And with no big stars, Heights more than doubled and tripled the opening weekends of two thrillers that were also simultaneously released on HBO Max (the Denzel Washington/Rami Malek-led The Little Things on Jan. 29 and the Angelina Jolie-toplined Those Who Wish Me Dead on May 14). There are a flood of musicals now in production and development. Two Broadway adaptations, Matilda and 13, are due from Netflix next year. And plenty of others  including Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, The Color Purple, The King and I, Mean Girls, Merrily We Roll Along, Wicked, Spamalot, Follies, The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, Little Shop of Horrors and more  are in various stages of development. This year [Cannes] is rich in musical films, says fest artistic director Thierry Frmaux, and we will soon see if this phenomenon, quite difficult to explain, confirms the current trend.  Theres star-director Valrie Lemerciers out-of-competition Aline, a bizarrely conceived biopic billed as a fiction freely inspired by the life of Celine Dion with soundalike Dion songs. Two other dramas, Nabil Ayouchs competition entry Casablanca Beats and Audrey Estrougos midnight screening Suprmes, feature several rap performances. In Directors Fortnight, Saul Williams and Anisia Uzeyman offer a sci-fi take on the genre with Neptune Frost, which Lin-Manuel Miranda helped finance as a fan via Kickstarter. Arnaud and Jean-Marie Larrieus midnight screening, Tralala, is the most traditional musical comedy among the bunch. And we may see more of the genre in France. In 2019, there was an initiative of the CNC [the National Centre for Cinema and the Moving Image] focused on musicals, and Tralala was selected to benefit from it, says Stephanie Lamome, artistic adviser of the fests film department. In Cannes, we will create musical events and live performances linked directly to these films. One thats expected will feature Bill Murray. Hes promoting a special screening of Andrew Muscatos New Worlds: The Cradle of Civilization, which captures his spoken word collaboration with three classical musicians at a Greek concert. Back in the U.S., musicals will soon draw crowds to theaters at the inaugural Broadway Live Cinema Festival. Running July 15-Aug. 6 at the AMC Empire 25 in New York City, it will integrate live performances by Broadway stars with films including Chicago and In the Heights. The fest hits AMC Theatres in major U.S. cities this fall and winter with a touring cast, lighting, sound system and a stage that adapts to cinemas. What Im most thrilled about is how different all these films are, Miranda says of the many new additions to the genre. [While it] hasnt always been the case, the movie musical is now alive and well.