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To understand why Hollywood is moving aggressively into making musicals for Broadway, just look out the eighth-floor office window of Jimmy Horowitz, the president of Universal Pictures.
On the studio lot below, along a route where trams of tourists roll by, is a black-and-green poster for the hit musical Wicked. Universal is the majority investor in the show, which has grossed $3 billion since 2003 from productions in New York, Chicago, London, Tokyo, and dozens of other cities. More to the point: Wicked is on track to become the most profitable venture in the 101-year history of Universal, Horowitz acknowledged in an interview, more lucrative than its top-grossing movies like Jurassic Park and E.T. The show is an open-ended juggernaut, charging 10 times more per ticket than movie theatres do.
“Wicked opened our eyes to the possibility of what can happen when you have a show that becomes a perennial,” said Horowitz, whose studio initially planned to make the 1995 novel Wicked into a film instead — and now expects to make a movie of the musical someday, expanding the franchise. “I don’t think we’d appreciated what those revenue streams could be.”
Now Universal is turning Animal House into a musical, and Back to the Future and The Sting may be next. Twentieth Century Fox is eyeing Mrs Doubtfire, The Devil Wears Prada and Waitress. Sony is developing Tootsie. Warner Bros has Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in London and is talking to producers about a possible musical version of the Channing Tatum flick Magic Mike.
And once again, this season on Broadway is dominated by screen-to-stage adaptations like Rocky, The Bridges of Madison County, Bullets Over Broadway and Big Fish, all of which have varying degrees of studio involvement. The musical Aladdin is coming this winter, adapted in-house by Disney, which has the biggest screen-to-stage hit of all: The Lion King, with its worldwide gross of $5.4 billion.
If the Hollywood frenzy raises questions about originality — has theatre become just a derivative cog in brand machinery? — the stage adaptations may simply be too financially rewarding for the studios and Broadway to cut back. And adaptations can be artistically creative: The new musical American Psycho (based on a book that became a film) is about a serial killer, while this year’s Tony Award winner for best musical, Kinky Boots, is based on a little-known British movie and has the first Broadway score by the pop superstar Cyndi Lauper.
But what does it take for a movie to become a blockbuster musical? That’s the puzzle Hollywood executives want to crack. “We’re looking through our 4,000 movies for the stories with the strongest emotional resonance, for stories that feel like they want to be sung onstage,” said Lia Vollack, who oversees theatre for Sony and is also president of the company’s worldwide music division. “And I wouldn’t rule out any genre.”
To that end, Universal invested in the recent Broadway musicals Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson and The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess to cultivate ties with their rising-star directors, Alex Timbers and Diane Paulus. Last month, Fox announced a partnership with one of Broadway’s most successful producers, Kevin McCollum (Rent, Avenue Q, In the Heights), to help turn nine to 12 movies into stage musicals. Fox executives also tapped Isaac Robert Hurwitz of the New York Musical Theater Festival to advise them on their projects with McCollum and on theatre producing strategy.
At the heart of the Fox deals is a recognition by the studio that most filmmakers don’t really know how to make great stage musicals on their own. The most successful one is Scott Rudin, an Academy Award winner, who is one of the lead producers of the smash hit The Book of Mormon. Studio executives say they are counting on Broadway veterans to tell them, among other things, whether characters like Euphegenia Doubtfire or Bluto Blutarsky can be made to sing — and if so, how that should be done. MGM, for instance, has some approval rights in the musical version of Rocky over casting and certain production elements, but left most decisions to the creative team, led by Timbers.
“They definitely never weighed in on content,” including the climactic fight between Rocky and Apollo Creed, Timbers said of MGM. Sony, too, took a collaborative approach with the film producers Dan Jinks and Bruce Cohen on the musical adaptation of Big Fish. Songs by Andrew Lippa (The Wild Party) were performed for Sony executives, and they weighed in on script and production choices, ultimately deciding to invest in the Broadway run, which starts in September.
“A movie can have so many more scenes than a musical, and so much can be achieved with close-ups and other cinematic devices, so we had to think carefully about which scenes to keep and make theatrical and what other moments could be turned to song,” Jinks said. “In the movie, there’s a scene where time stops and the main character walks through a circus tent — a mesmerising scene. For the musical, Andrew has a written a song called Time Stops, and it hits you emotionally in a way only musical theatre can.”
Even the original star of Rocky, Sylvester Stallone, who is one of the musical’s producers, says, “Some movies work perfectly as movies, and you don’t want to mess around with them,” Stallone said. “But I think the Rocky musical is really original, not some derivative silly show. We know, and the studio knows, that audiences will have the final word, though.”