Musical Movies Today

By: Zade S.

       A recent viral TikTok has found its way onto the screens of many consumers; it depicts an audience of the new Mean Girls musical movie from January. The original Mean Girls from 2004 was not a musical, so during the bit of opening dialogue in the 2024 remake, everyone is quiet and engaged. But when a character starts to sing, the audio is drowned out by a sea of laughs and groans, and some viewers even leave the showing. It may or may not have been a good song, but just going by the video, we’ll never know. It was just the fact that there was singing that put off the audience.

       The forthright fact of the matter is quite clear to the general moviegoer:  musical movie ticket sales have been consistently dropping since 2023. The rates plunged from over a billion tickets sold to only two hundred million over the pandemic, spiked back up, but didn’t recover, as 2023 saw the public’s declining interest, selling only six hundred million tickets. Of course, these plummeting rates aren’t for nothing, and you may be surprised to hear that this is not completely COVID-19’s fault.

       Musical movie marketers are becoming ashamed of their own products. Says an anonymous movie marketer, “If you spell out the word musical, people have pre-formed opinions. Musical has a connotation that [characters] are going to sing every word, and audiences can be turned off.” In layman’s terms, that means that if people know a movie is a musical, they may not go, and the movie profit will be left among the ashes with other commonplace flops.

       The Mean Girls TikTok is displaying a classic, severe affliction of “Failure-to-communicate-itis.” Forbes writer Conor Murray says, “The official trailer for Mean Girls, released by Paramount Pictures in November, doesn’t contain any of the film’s original music…” And this isn’t some at-a-glance assumption. He’s backed up by New York Times author Alexis Soloski, who writes, “The first trailer, from November… included no original music. It was made to look instead like a vaguely edgier remix of the 2004 film.” If you take the two articles and whisk them up, sprinkle on the hordes of misinformed viewers who were there for the first week of showings around the country, what do you get? Sales dropped significantly just the next month!

       Admittedly, there is some singing in a Mean Girls trailer. In the second trailer, Regina George (an antagonist, portrayed by Renée Rapp in the film,) sings only two notes from one of her main reprised songs.

       Now, once again, musical movie producers and marketers aren’t afraid of nothing. Their fears are based on the fact that such musical movies as The Color Purple, West Side Story, and especially In the Heights struggled at the box office over the pandemic. However, there was one key word in that sentence: pandemic! You couldn’t go to the movie theater much (you wouldn’t go at all if you were in your right mind), so how would movies make much profit?

       Let’s review some other famous musical movies and their earnings. Wonka, another recent musical movie that was not marketed, grossed $470 million. Frozen 2, the sequel to the world-famous Frozen, was not initially marketed. This was a shocking surprise as the first installation grossed $1.28 billion! And furthermore, Frozen 2 itself actually grossed more; somehow, the sequel was somewhat more popular and reached an astronomical height of $1.453 billion!

       A whole heap of musical movies have been bestowed by  many prestigious academy awards. The 2002 Chicago musical movie grossed $300 million and won the best picture Oscar, but it was still ashamed of itself in its own special way. Even back then, people were looking for a way to say, “Huh? What musical? I don’t see any around here!” All the musical numbers in the Chicago movie were dream sequences.

       La La Land, starring the artful academy award winners Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone, grossed $472 million; it also won six Oscars (not including best picture). 1954’s Guys and Dolls featured two of the biggest stars in all history, Frank Sinatra and Marlon Brando. The acting was exquisite, and the sets, the cinematography, the music, and everything else were of the highest quality!  That won best picture, too! So have My Fair Lady (1964), West Side Story (1961), Oliver (1968), and The Sound of Music (1964)! So if so many musical movies have had such amazing success, why shy away from a sprawling and profitable business over only two or three movies?

       And there’s new movie trailers busting out of the woodwork. Why, just during the Superbowl, the first teaser for Wicked came out. If you weren’t already aware, Wicked is one of the greatest musicals of all time, composed and lyricised by Stephen Schwartz, and the book written by Winnie Holzman. It tells the life story of Elphaba, more commonly known as the Wicked Witch of the West, from the Wizard of Oz; in the play she is displayed as a misunderstood soul. In my own studies, I’ve found it to be one of the favorite musicals of the century, weighing in at seven votes out of 60 people surveyed (as of April 15th, 2024). And yet, in the trailer, there is no singing, save for a tad of Defying Gravity (a generally accepted showstopper), easily dismissed as just another smidgen of background music.

       Musical movie marketers are targeting the widest possible audience with this tactic for the widest possible profit. Ryan Faughnder from the Los Angeles Times says, “To reach the largest audience, studios tend to sell movies by showing viewers what they already know they like.” Mean Girls is also a great example of this. Instead of marketing the music, they marketed the heartful characters. But music makes up a big part of the movie and helps develop character like the original iteration couldn’t.

       So, our bloodthirsty conquest for money has gotten the better of us once again. Instead of letting people go who want to, marketers are bamboozling those of us who wouldn’t rather go. As exemplified by such movies as Mean Girls and Wonka, marketers are cutting music from trailers. If you enjoy musicals, and want to support the industry, show the corporate execs you don’t have to be tricked into appreciating the arts.