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What’s wrong with movie musicals?

What’s wrong with movie musicals?

Everyone hates movie musicals, right?

Well, this list of critically acclaimed musicals that won big awards at the Oscars – think about it Chicago, or The sound of music, or La-La-Land, which lost Best Picture but still won half a dozen Oscars – seems to tell a different story.

Of course, musicals are not inherently worse than other films or inherently rejected by the mainstream. But over the past decade, movie musicals — at least those that haven’t been successfully adapted into proshots — have struggled to reach the same historic levels of audience and critical acclaim. Is the genre dying out or is there a concrete solution to save it?

The desire to turn musicals into films is understandable. Broadway is inaccessible, especially for young artists who live in New York and dream of making it to the big stage but can’t afford the luxury tickets to the heart of their own industry. So it makes a lot of sense to adapt these musicals for the screen: they’re easier to produce when screenwriters work from a play script; Producers can increase box office returns with big Hollywood names; And fans of the Broadway show who previously only had access to the album or grainy pirated copies can pay less than $20 to watch the film with their friends.

In theory this formula is fantastic, but in practice it obviously didn’t work. The producers of these adaptations often do not understand the soul of the show they are translating to the big screen, nor what they should adapt in order for the story to thrive in a cinematic context.

It’s important to note that musicals written for the screen don’t receive as much public criticism. Examples of this include most animated Disney content, i.e. the theater kid’s understated favorite tick, tick… BOOM!, and Damian Chazelles again La La Land. Ultimately, a director like Chazelle knows how to incorporate crucial elements of the genre – the stirring musical numbers, the complex interplay of camera movement and choreography, and the suspension of disbelief when dialogue becomes text – into a film, and that’s what sets you apart 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 movie buff. A good musical is pure fun, set in a world where everything is just a little more whimsical and cheerful, simply because people spontaneously start singing. (Also, it’s hard to take a film connoisseur seriously when they express strong disdain for musical theater. Cinema is theater, it just happens to be better financed.)

Three current musicals are considered examples of failed attempts to film musicals. The prom tells the story of a lesbian teenager in Indiana who attracts the attention of a troupe of down-and-out Broadway actors when her school bans her from taking her girlfriend to prom. The film had a brief theatrical release 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 snarky, insincere performances of beloved characters felt like an annoying slap in the face to LGBTQ viewers, distorting the original show’s strong message of acceptance and humility. The prom Critics and fans alike wished that the creative team had prioritized preserving the authentic soul of the original… and begged casting directors across Los Angeles to remove James Corden from their contact lists.

Dear Evan Hansen is about a troubled teenager who, under false pretenses, gets close to the family of a former classmate who recently died by suicide. The Stephen Chbosky-directed film adaptation premiered in theaters in 2021, and the unpopular, nepotistic decision to cast Ben Platt as the title character immediately caused a stir. Platt’s stage performance should have been immortalized separately, because up close and personal in front of the camera, the 27-year-old looked shockingly out of place in a high school setting.

By not choosing a younger actor, Chbosky faced an uphill battle in carefully portraying the complicated plotlines of the story itself, which, not to mention the borderline glorification of suicide, relies heavily on Evan’s childlike naivety and sympathetic approachability, to ultimately make amends for his months of lies and deception. The story in Dear Evan Hansen is less theatrical spectacle and more dark emotion, and therefore could have worked very well as a film, but ended up being a cautionary tale about poor creative judgment.

The third current musical adaptation is, of course, the inevitable winter phenomenon of 2024 Mean Girls, If You Live Under a Rock is a classic teen comedy about a formerly homeschooled girl who fits in with the most popular group at her new high school. The confusing publicity leading up to the release relied on evoking nostalgia for Tina Fey’s 2004 film while intentionally leaving the film’s musical content vague. Fans of the show felt that anything other than Renee Rapp’s reprisal of her role as Regina George was a pale imitation of the show’s ridiculously endearing Broadway fame, and everyone else landed somewhere on the scale from confused to annoyed as the characters from the Nothing began to sing.

The pattern is clear. Popular musicals end up going down the well-trodden path of film adaptation, where the teams behind them waste money on marketing, damaging the show’s reputation and alienating both fans of the original and the larger mainstream audience as a whole.

So what to do? While it’s not impossible to adapt a musical well (e.g. me, among others). otherI’m cautiously optimistic about what’s to come Evil Film) the future of this genre seems to lie in Proshots.

A proshot is a professional, multi-camera production of a live performance that can then be distributed online or sold to a streaming service. This happened when Disney+ bought Hamilton in 2020. There were no concerns Hamilton Proshot foregoes any of the magic of the original show because it presents a higher quality and more accessible version of exactly what you would see in the theater, even though you don’t actually see it there.

The success of Hamilton has inspired a number of other proshots of popular musicals including waitress And Kinky boots. Proshots are not required to match the original Broadway cast in terms of age, readiness, or appearance, and while they are not cheap to produce, overall they represent a far smaller financial undertaking than films. This will become even more true as more creative resources are directed away from film adaptations and into this community-supported, authentically theatrical Proshot world.

As one theater blogger astutely says, “Anyone who grew up watching Proshots knows that they can’t limit the audience that theater provides. They expand it.” If stage musicals are locked in a cheesy New York sphere, theater fans need to know the content find out for yourself. But the advent of widespread pro shots may be able to turn former movie musical haters into new musical theater lovers… and they don’t need a swanky CGI trailer or an A-list star cast to do it.