Do Movie Musicals Need Box Office Stars? (Whether They Can Sing or Not?)
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It might be time to admit Hollywood was right all along?
For years, we musical nerds have clamored for Hollywood to make movie adaptations of musicals with people who can actually sing.
It didn’t seem too big an ask, right?
Movie musicals are littered with examples of glaringly bad performances of Hollywood A-Listers who can’t hit a note. It’s bad enough we are seemingly stuck with Hugh Jackman and Anna Kendrick for every movie musical, but why must we get Academy Award-winning actors who can’t sing??
Well, unfortunately, I think we got our answer with “In The Heights”.
As of this writing, the global box office for “In The Heights” stands at $40 million, with just under $30 of that coming domestically.
Compare that to successful movie musicals:
Les Miserables ($440 million)
Mamma Mia ($609 million)
Mamma Mia 2 ($395 Million)
Chicago ($306 Million)
Into The Woods ($213 million)
or, good god, even unsuccessful adaptations like Cats ($75 million).
When you look at that list, you can see that “In The Heights” was an undeniable box office bomb.
Yes, it was released on HBO Max at the same time, and yes, it came out during a pandemic, unlike the other movies listed above. However, unlike the other movie musicals cited, it was loved by critics and fans alike, it enjoyed a wide release, and it had a major marketing push behind it for weeks.
So what happened? Why didn’t people come out to see it? After all, according to our own research, most fans were going to see this in the theatre and not HBO Max.
We might just have to admit that, maybe, movies do need movie stars to get box office traction.
After all, the biggest star in “In The Heights”, the actor with the biggest Q Score was… Jimmy Smits? (don’t @ me, it’s true!)
Compare that to the stars we have seen in previous musicals with strong box office: Meryl Streep and Pierce Brosnan (Mamma Mia), Hugh Jackman and Russel Crowe (Les Miserables), Richard Gere and Catherine Zeta-Jones (Chicago), John Travolta (Hairspray), Taylor Swift and Idris Elba (Cats), and its no contest.
The best comp to the box office performance of “In The Heights” was “Rent”. Released in 2005, the domestic box office was $29.0 million, very similar to “In The Heights”. “Rent” was a movie also without much star power, with Rosario Dawson and Taye Diggs as its main headliners.
“Rock of Ages” also only generated $39 million in the domestic box office with Tom Cruise in the lead, but reviews were very tepid, and seriously, was anyone buying Tom Cruise as a rock star??
So it really seems like star power matters to some degree.
Now, no one, and I mean no one, wants to hear Hollywood stars like Russell Crowe sing over proven Broadway vets (Once again, don’t @ me, I am totally aware Crowe had a band, but that doesn’t mean he can and should sing one of the iconic musical roles in theatre history, even if some people apparently did want to hear this in a bar).
But, while Les Miserables certainly had enough of a legacy to bring people to the seats, the fact that Jackman and Crowe were a part of the adaptation had to have helped box office performance, much like Meryl Streep and Johnny Depp were an undeniable draw to “Into the Woods”.
Why does this matter? After all, we got an authentically made production of “In The Heights”, right?
It matters because Hollywood is going to take lessons from this box office result, and unfortunately one of the lessons might be to not make any more musicals without a significant box office star attached. Ultimately, we want more of these productions, not less, and we can predict with certainty we will get fewer musicals without A-List stars going forward because of the poor box office of “In The Heights”.
We should note: I don’t think there’s anything “In The Heights” could have done differently casting-wise. There isn’t a single current Latinx star today that would have made a difference, whether they could sing or not, and we can finally put to bed the idea that Lin Manuel-Miranda has any kind of box office power.
Could they have waited until they had an impactful Latinx star?
Maybe.
Maybe “In The Heights” never had a chance.
Ultimately, we’ll be holding our breath to see if Steven Spielberg is enough of a box office draw for West Side Story.
Otherwise, we might just be seeing Les Miserables and Mamma Mia remade every 10 years.