This year’s surprise hit at the box office has been Bob Marley: One Love. The biopic of the reggae icon has grossed over $170m and counting, meaning it’s only behind Kung Fu Panda 4 and Dune: Part Two in 2024 receipts. Next month sees the release of Back to Black, an Amy Winehouse biopic that is expected to perform strongly on the back of a slew of free promo for its questionable likenesses and ghoulish portrayal of the ill-fated singer. Bob Dylan, Michael Jackson, Grateful Dead, Billy Joel, Boy George, Maria Callas, Linda Ronstadt, Fred Astaire, Carole King, George Michael, Bee Gees, Keith Moon and the Beatles (times four, one for each member) – all have biopics about them due in the coming months.
While Hollywood today is dominated by sequels, remakes and comic book extended universes, 2023 saw the decline of the superhero movie. While the summer slate is still headlined by a couple of comic book titles (notably Deadpool & Wolverine and Joker 2) it does appear that audience demand has peaked and that the superhero movie is finally going “the way of the western” as predicted by Steven Spielberg a decade ago. Forever in search of a new trend capable of buffeting their revenues, studios are increasingly looking towards music biopics to provide reliable income (theatrical chains expect this year’s North American box office to be down 11% on 2023’s strong performance).
Although grounded in reality and often featuring mature themes (plenty of sex and drugs amid the rock’n’roll) music biopics ape superhero movies in that they come steeped in mythology, and with an eager audience of already devoted fans baked in, essentially allowing the studios to have their cake (compete for awards) and eat it (cash out).
In essence, 20th-century pop culture represents an extended universe that studios and film-makers can mine for profit. It doesn’t hurt that these films typically don’t cost a bomb, with most of the budget going on music rights. Not that you necessarily need to shell out for the actual songs: Nowhere Boy, England is Mine, and Stardust show you can work around the lack of hits by focusing on the origin story. What’s more these films have the potential for huge upside if they can find a large audience beyond fans. Prior to Oppenheimer, Bohemian Rhapsody ($910m) was the highest-grossing biopic of all time and Elvis, Rocketman and Straight Outta Compton all performed brilliantly relative to their $40m to $80m budgets.
Music biopics also represent a way of keeping actor fees to a minimum – Austin Butler only got a reported $700,000 for portraying Elvis. Of course, the best ones feature a lead actor capable of embodying a legendarily charismatic star but the presence of a marquee “character” to some extent ameliorates the need for a huge star. In this sense, biopics mirror superhero movies – they may be huge stars now but Tom Hiddleston, Chris Hemsworth, Chris Evans and Tom Holland were not exactly massive names prior to getting cast as marquee fictional characters. Perhaps having Elvis or Bob Marley’s name on the poster means it doesn’t matter if the person playing them is a relative no mark.
While some of these films received criticism for being formulaic, hitting recurrent beats such as the artist suffering at the hands of sceptical parents or the band coming together for the first time, before inevitably falling out over the frontman’s outsized share of the glory, they create opportunities for fan service (and parody as in the underrated biopic Weird: The Al Yankovic story). They also create space for more experimental cinema such as Todd Haynes’ Bob Dylan biopic, I’m Not There (with Cate Blanchett’s performance representing a template for how a successful performance need not be a perfect imitation). And just like a superhero, music stars can be recast and reconfigured. Timothée Chalamet’s take on Bob Dylan is just around the corner.
With fan speculation already rife as to who Mendes will cast in his forthcoming Beatles tetralogy (with an individual film devoted to each of the Fab Four, creating a shared universe more commonly found in … superhero movies) it seems the music biopic will remain as a highly profitable Hollywood staple for a few years at least. But whether fans will truly have the appetite for four separate flicks will probably be a defining acid test as to whether they can deliver the sustained success that superhero movies have over the past few decades.
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