When Antoine Fuqua’s “Michael” hits theaters this weekend, it will mark the end of a lengthy journey to the big screen. Or the end of the beginning, at least, as sequels appear to be coming whether we like it or not.
The Michael Jackson biopic battled myriad production troubles (many of which were self-inflicted), but it’s finally ready to entertain audiences looking for a dose of ’80s pop nostalgia. If you’re a big Michael Jackson fan, it’s an excuse to revisit some of your favorite songs and explore the life of a deeply complicated entertainer. But if you’re getting tired of music biopics, you’d be forgiven for thinking it’s just more of the same.
The past decade has seen the release of films about Elvis Presley, Elton John, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Queen, Bob Marley, Amy Winehouse, Whitney Houston, Aretha Franklin, Robbie Williams, Weird Al Yankovic, and now, Michael Jackson. And the trend does not appear to be slowing down any time soon.
In 2028, Sony will release four Beatles biopics from Sam Mendes (one for each Beatle, naturally). Meanwhile, Universal announced a new Snoop Dogg biopic at CinemaCon. And that’s before we get into high-profile development projects without official start dates, like Ridley Scott’s Bee Gees biopic “You Should Be Dancing” and Cameron Crowe’s long-gestating Joni Mitchell biopic that may or may not star Meryl Streep. While news has been quiet on both fronts, Martin Scorsese was also attached to direct movies about Jerry Garcia and Frank Sinatra in the past five years.
All of which raises the question… when does it end?
Hollywood studios have never seemed interested in leaving audiences wanting more, and it’s fair to assume that these films will keep being made until demand dies down. (And probably for another five years after that.) Despite every online cinephile you know telling you how bored they are with music biopics, demand continues to be healthy. They don’t all hit, but when films like “A Complete Unknown” ($140 million worldwide) and “Elvis” ($288 million worldwide) are comfortably pulling in nine-figure box office hauls, studios will want to keep the party going.
But what about the supply? Films about beloved rock, pop, and rap stars of the late 20th century have been coming out at such a clip that it’s fair to wonder if we’re going to run out of source material soon. If you stopped someone on the street and asked them to name the 10 biggest rock acts of the past half-century, you could probably direct them to movies about eight or nine of their picks. There’s still some low-hanging fruit (it can’t be long before we get a Rolling Stones movie), but the pool is only getting smaller, and the IP isn’t as easily replenishable as comic books or video games. But if there’s one thing I know about Hollywood, it’s that when there’s a track record of box office success to be repeated, somebody finds a way.
Maybe musicians go the way of the superhero, with studios trying to squeeze as many films as possible out of the IP they already control. In recent years, music biopics have begun to shift away from “Walk Hard”-style birth-to-death sagas toward specific stories about distinct chapters in a musician’s life. “A Complete Unknown” chronicled Bob Dylan’s transition from folk to rock with his infamous Newport performance in 1966, while “Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere” focused exclusively on the recording of the “Nebraska” album.
While the narrowed focus brought artistic benefits, there are certainly more stories to tell from Dylan’s and Springsteen’s lives. Perhaps the next era of biopics will see actors signing multi-picture deals to play their rock-and-roll lookalikes for years. Sony’s ambitious rollout of the four “Beatles” movies will be a crucial test of this strategy.
There’s also the possibility that we don’t wait nearly as long to start cashing in on ’90s and 2000s nostalgia than we did for the ’60s and ’70s. If demand is strong enough, perhaps there’s a world where we start seeing Taylor Swift and Beyoncé biopics while the subjects are still young and in the prime of their careers. It could even start a trend of stars being more creatively involved in their own biopics than the typical script approval we normally see. Swift has been open about wanting to direct movies for years… who better to make a film about her own career, which would probably shatter box office records?
As exhausting as the onslaught of biopics can sometimes feel, it’s hard to imagine that production will slow down. Along with the NFL and a few major video games, music is one of the last gasps of American monoculture. Our shared history with musicians of the past half-century outweighs our collective investment in any new IP that has emerged since 2000, and even relative bottom-of-the-barrel names attract attention in ways that original ideas rarely do.
In the end, all of the speculation about increased creativity might be futile. We might all be doomed to talk about new Eddie Money and Peaches and Herb biopics in 2035, even if we don’t know it yet.
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