A Brief History of Movies Based on Musicals Based on Movies

It seems a little ridiculous for a movie to be successful enough to warrant adapting as a stage musical and for that stage musical to then be successful enough to warrant adapting into a musical movie. (30 Rock, always prescient, even made a joke about it.) Yet this specific confluence of events occurs surprisingly often, with two examples (The Color Purple and Mean Girls) opening in theaters in just the past few weeks.

The tradition goes back at least to the 1950s (and the line between the stage and screen was much more permeable during Hollywood’s Golden Age). In some cases, these movies originate with other source material — both The Color Purple and Mean Girls are originally based on books — but the musicals owe their existence to the movies, and the subsequent movie musical adaptations are always presented as remakes of the earlier films, rather than new interpretations of the books.

The most notable examples of the screen-to-stage-to-screen transition aren’t always the best movies, but they’re snapshots of how Hollywood has approached musicals, from the era of outsize MGM productions to the current obsession with recycled IP. Here are ten essential movies to chart the way that Hollywood has adapted its own adaptations of itself.

This colorful MGM musical based on Ernst Lubitsch’s 1939 movie, Ninotchka, is missing the famed “Lubitsch touch” that the director brought to his romantic comedies, which sparkled with wit and innuendo, but it compensates with other charms. Primarily those come from star Cyd Charisse, who’s elegant and enchanting as Soviet government agent Ninotchka. She’s paired with Fred Astaire, who’s slowed down a bit in what was billed as his final role in a musical. Still, that places two of cinema’s greatest dancers at the center of the film. When they’re singing and dancing, either together or separately, director Rouben Mamoulian showcases their mesmerizing talent and grace, especially in a wordless solo dance number for Charisse as Ninotchka is lured in by decadent Parisian fashions. Silk Stockings swaps out Ninotchka’s French nobleman suitor for an American movie producer, and while the story still emphasizes the divide between capitalism and communism, its gentle satire is more about showbiz than politics. Charisse and Astaire can’t surpass the memory of Greta Garbo and Melvyn Douglas, but they bring their own kind of glamour.

Before directing landmark musicals Cabaret and All That Jazz, Bob Fosse began his filmmaking career with this musical adapted from Federico Fellini’s 1957 film Nights of Cabiria. Fosse also directed and choreographed the stage version, which starred his wife, Gwen Verdon, who’s replaced in the film by Shirley MacLaine in the role of naïve but cheerful New York City taxi dancer Charity Hope Valentine. Fosse’s film has a more hopeful tone than Fellini’s, although Charity is nearly as unlucky as Fellini’s Roman sex worker Cabiria. Fosse demonstrates the beginnings of the assured visual style he’d bring to his later films, enhancing the musical numbers with freeze-frames and snap zooms, and gearing his choreography to the camera rather than the stage. He portrays a vibrant late-1960s NYC, complete with underground dance clubs, hippies, and a counterculture preacher played by Sammy Davis Jr. MacLaine is both vulnerable and indomitable as the title character, and the soundtrack includes songs that have justifiably become American standards. A commercial and critical failure on its initial release, Sweet Charity now looks like the key to Fosse’s later brilliance.

It’s a testament to Roger Corman’s skills as a filmmaker that the 1960 movie about a killer plant that he put together in two days on leftover sets from another production provided the basis for a long-running stage musical and this delightful hit movie, which has largely eclipsed Corman’s original. Director Frank Oz is working with more resources than Corman ever had, and he evokes the style and spirit of classic Hollywood musicals while retaining the twisted sensibility of both Corman’s movie and the stage show by Howard Ashman and Alan Menken. Ashman and Menken’s songs are every bit as good as any of their iconic Disney compositions, and evil plant Audrey II (voiced by the Four Tops’ Levi Stubbs) remains one of the greatest cinematic feats of puppetry. Rick Moranis gives one of his best performances as hapless flower-shop employee Seymour Krelborn, and the supporting cast of comedy all-stars (Steve Martin, John Candy, Bill Murray) provides consistent laughs, both during and between musical numbers.

And here we have a musical adaptation whose primary purpose is to make fun of the movie it’s adapting. The 1936 anti-marijuana propaganda film Reefer Madness is in the public domain due to an improper copyright notice, and over the years it’s been colorized, sampled, and subjected to RiffTrax’s comedic commentary. Kevin Murphy and Dan Studney thus didn’t need permission to create their 2001 Off Broadway production, or this film adaptation from original stage director Andy Fickman. With its Showtime TV-movie budget, Reefer Madness is much less lavish than most of the other entries on this list, but that fits with the seediness of its source material. Murphy and Studney can generate laughs simply by having their cast repeat verbatim lines from the absurd original, and setting that movie’s overheated plot to music highlights how truly unhinged it is. Kristen Bell and Ana Gasteyer demonstrate their formidable musical-comedy skills, and Alan Cumming plays a range of characters that includes both Beelzebub and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, as well as a fearmongering lecturer presenting a screening of the movie in a framing sequence that remains sadly relevant.

Proof that simply re-creating a Broadway hit onscreen is no guarantee of a good movie, the film version of Mel Brooks’s stage musical based on his 1967 comedy brings over the main stars of the hugely successful Broadway run (Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick), helmed by the original director/choreographer (Susan Stroman), and the result is just dreadful, one of the worst movie musicals of the last two decades. Every performance is miscalculated, full of screeching, bug-eyed mugging and loudly played to the back of the house. It’s a feat when a movie can boast Will Ferrell’s all-time least-subtle performance. Even the jokes that are directly imported from Brooks’s original movie fall flat. The pacing is abysmal, with Brooks’s lively story about a pair of Broadway producers who try to fleece investors by deliberately creating a flop dragged out for more than two hours. Middling reviews and middling box-office returns didn’t stop it from making a major pop-culture impact, though, paving the way for other high-profile Hollywood musical remakes. The rest of this list owes its existence at least in part to The Producers — for better or worse.

Sure, director/choreographer Adam Shankman’s film version of the stage musical based on John Waters’s 1988 film tones down much of Waters’s outsider perspective. But Waters himself probably would have made Hairspray a full-scale musical if he’d had the chance, and the opening number paying tribute to his native Baltimore still name-checks the city’s rats, bums, and a flasher played by Waters himself. The musical numbers are so catchy, exuberant, and creatively staged that it’s easy to get caught up in the movie’s giddy enthusiasm. The story about white teenager Tracy Turnblad (Nikki Blonsky) leading the charge to integrate a local dance TV show in 1962 is a gross oversimplification of racial politics, but that’s also part of the point, showcasing the sunny cluelessness of privileged do-gooders. Shankman’s heart is in the right place, and the same goes for the characters, who combat racism with infectious dance routines. The only stumbling block is John Travolta’s uncanny-valley appearance as Tracy’s mother, Edna, in a misguided tribute to Divine’s role in the original movie. Every time he shows up, the movie goes from heartwarming to unsettling.

The success of director Rob Marshall’s 2002 take on Chicago gave him the clout to make this star-studded disaster, based on Maury Yeston and Arthur Kopit’s musical adaptation of Federico Fellini’s 8½. Fellini’s 1963 film is such a deeply personal work of art that turning it into a glossy, crowd-pleasing production seems like an insult, and Marshall’s film interprets Fellini’s ennui as cheap vulgarity. Daniel Day-Lewis makes a rare acting misstep as Fellini stand-in Guido Contini, who’s undergoing an existential crisis as he attempts to make his latest film. The various women in his life show up to sing their feelings at him, in musical numbers that are confined to a single sound stage and play like disjointed fashion-advertisement interludes. Almost no one in the cast is a good singer, with Kate Hudson standing out as the worst, in her grating number “Cinema Italiano,” which Yeston wrote for the movie. A failure both critically and at the box office, Nine was nevertheless nominated for four Oscars.

Danny DeVito’s 1996 film comes closer to the grubby nastiness of Roald Dahl’s novel, but this shinier adaptation of the hit stage production still finds plenty of room for Dahl’s mean-spirited appeal. Newcomer Alisha Weir gives a breakout performance as Matilda Wormwood, a neglected child with both a genius IQ and telekinetic powers. The musical film spends more time at Matilda’s school, where Emma Thompson plays the hulking, tyrannical headmistress Miss Trunchbull, and less time with Matilda’s boorish family, although Stephen Graham and Andrea Riseborough make the most of their scenes as Matilda’s parents. The songs by Tim Minchin will easily get stuck in your head, and the musical numbers are all the more impressive given that the majority of them are performed by an ensemble of children. Weir isn’t the only one acting and singing her theater-kid heart out, and the movie builds to a glorious climax during showstopper “Revolting Children” as Matilda and her classmates take on Miss Trunchbull. It’s the kind of cathartic, triumphant moment that only a musical can truly deliver.

Turning Steven Spielberg’s 1985 adaptation of Alice Walker’s novel into a musical highlights both its strengths and its shortcomings: Like Spielberg’s film, Blitz Bazawule’s film version of the 2004 stage musical downplays the darker elements of Walker’s decades-spanning Southern saga. Bazawule especially has trouble handling the story line for Danielle Brooks’s Sofia, a proud Black woman whose spirit is nearly destroyed by both overt and implicit racism. But his film also more effectively captures the joyful togetherness of the characters as they support each other through hard times, expressed via song. Bazawule, a veteran musician as well as a filmmaker, stages energetic musical numbers that may sometimes come off as cheesy and maudlin but never undermine the characters’ internal struggles. As Celie, star Fantasia Barrino is overshadowed by both Brooks and Taraji P. Henson as blues singer Shug Avery, whose forceful charisma contrasts with Barrino’s hesitancy. The overall result is an imperfect but watchable take on Walker’s book, as filtered through Spielbergian sentimentality.

Striking a careful balance between updating some of the problematic elements of the 2004 movie and retaining many of its iconic, quotable lines, writer/producer Tina Fey comes up with a smart new take on her classic teen comedy. Star Angourie Rice, with her thin singing voice and subdued presence, looks a little lost at times, but that fits the role of formerly home-schooled teen Cady Heron, who’s overwhelmed and then corrupted by the brutal hierarchy of American high school. Even with the original performances of Rachel McAdams and Amanda Seyfried to live up to, Renée Rapp and Avantika shine as queen bee Regina George and her dim-witted lieutenant Karen, and Moana’s Auli’i Cravalho gives outsider Janis a livelier presence than the sarcastic Lizzy Caplan did. The songs have been substantially pared down from the Broadway version, but directors Samantha Jayne and Arturo Perez Jr. make the musical numbers suitably dynamic, and the songwriting’s pop-punk influences evoke the original movie’s time period without sounding dated.