BOB MARLEY, AMY WINEHOUSE, THE BEATLES ARE ALL GETTING MOVIES, BUT IS THIS BIOPIC BOOM A GOOD THING?
Shortly after news broke that The Beatles would be the subject of four separate biopics, memes quickly flooded social media, likening it to the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Was this just Phase One of a lucrative cinematic franchise in which everyone from Yoko Ono to original drummer Pete Best would get their own entry in an expanded BCU? (That's the Beatles Cinematic Universe.)
Sure, it's all just a bit of online fun. And the jury's obviously out on The Beatles movies until we see them in 2027. But the pot for a Fab Four quadrilogy was already boiling given how dependable (and bankable) a genre the music biopic has become.
Since 2020 alone, we've had silver screen depictions about Whitney Houston, David Bowie, "Weird Al" Yankovic, Aretha Franklin, Tammy Wynette, Leonard Bernstein … and not one but two Presley related pictures in Baz Luhrmann's Elvis and Sofia Coppola's Priscilla.
Recent months have seen the release of biopics on Amy Winehouse and Bob Marley, and there's many more on the horizon.
Beyond Bob and The Beatles, there's movies in production about Bob Dylan (played by Timothée Chalamet), Bruce Springsteen (The Bear star Jeremy Allen White), Frank Sinatra (Leonard DiCaprio), Madonna (Julia Garner), Linda Ronstadt (Selena Gomez), Carole King (Daisy Edgar-Jones), Michael Jackson (the late pop star's nephew, Jaafar Jackson) plus Bee Gees, Boy George, The Grateful Dead and more.
But are we reaching peak music biopic saturation? How many is too many? And where did the current biopic boom come from?
A potted history
From books to biographies, Hollywood has always loved an adaptation. The first movies were about subjects including Joan of Arc, the Kelly gang, and Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata.
Produced by the film company of Thomas Edison (yes, the inventor), the 14-minute silent film The Origin of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata (1909) took major creative license with the facts. It focused on the myth the piece was improvised by moonlight for a blind orphan girl.
For the record: not true. But the movie's attitude of "never let the truth get in the way of a good story" set a standard that cinema broadly follows to this day.
In the past century or so, there's been countless celluloid portrayals of musicians, to varying degrees of success.
In fact, it can seem like a cheat code, given best actor and actress Oscar wins through the 90s (Shine) and mid-00s (Ray, Walk the Line, La Vie en Rose).
For every fondly remembered picture or well-received hit – think Coal Miner's Daughter, Bird, or Bound for Glory – there's just as many turkeys.
As a Classic Rock listicle on the worst biopics ever made – singling out duds about Def Leppard, Meat Loaf, The Doors and more – succinctly put it, many "used to be badly researched, badly scripted, badly acted and badly received."
But there's never been a box office flop big enough to sink our endless fascination with historical figures and appetite for universal rags-to-riches narratives.
Biopics keep getting made because musicians – be they tortured artists or pop superstars – are a natural fit for classic rise-and-fall (and rise again) stories.
The Bohemian Rhapsody boom
The current surge in music biopics can be traced back to the breakthrough success of Queen biopic Bohemian Rhapsody.
Despite mixed reviews, it was a box office smash, becoming the sixth highest-grossing movie of 2018, earning more than $US900 million ($1.4 billion) worldwide and rocketing past the $US200 million ($312 million) of previous top-earner Straight Outta Compton, the 2015 biopic about controversial gangster rap pioneers N.W.A., co-produced by Dr Dre.
"Nobody expected it to be that huge," Queen guitarist Brian May told Newsweek.
"We thought it would do quite well. We didn't expect it to be a record-breaking blockbuster."
Rami Malek took home the best actor Oscar for his portrayal of frontman Freddie Mercury, one of four won by Bohemian Rhapsody at the 2019 Academy Awards.
"Queen fans loved it because it's the Queen they want to remember," says Steve Gaunson, associate professor in cinema studies at RMIT.
"That's what a lot of these biopics are doing. It's made for the fans and how they want to remember the artist.
"In Bohemian Rhapsody you're only really seeing what's great about Freddie Mercury."
The same could be said for Bob Marley: One Love, which is about to snatch Bohemian Rhapsody's box office crown.
Co-written and directed by Reinaldo Marcus Green and starring Kingsley Ben-Adir as the reggae icon, One Love has already grossed over $US175 million ($273 million) worldwide after just a month in cinemas, despite middling reviews.
"The biopics that are the most celebratory of the artist seem to be the ones doing much better," Gaunson notes.
He emphasises the critical and commercial divide when comparing the superhuman spectacle of Baz Luhrmann's Elvis (which raked in more than $444 million) to The King's depiction as a "wife-basher, drug-taker" in Sofia Coppola's Priscilla.
"It doesn't celebrate Elvis in the way that Luhrmann's film does, however I would say that what Sofia Coppola does is give a deeper more nuanced depiction.
"If you look at the box office figures, people didn't want to see Priscilla because it negatively depicts Elvis, they want to see the films celebrating the artist in an un-confrontational and un-critical way."
Films like Elvis and One Love tend to summarise rather than offer deeper insight, content to re-stage key moments and hit songs.
Bohemian Rhapsody runs at 135 minutes "and 25 of those minutes are dedicated to re-creating Queen's famous Live Aid concert, when you can just go on YouTube and watch that concert," Guason points out.
This approach to a biopic – Hollywood adaptations of Wikipedia articles – may appeal to mainstream audiences precisely because they offer "greatest hits" summaries of artist careers.
"I think what audiences like about biopics is that they give a coherent narrative about multimedia superstars," says Radha O'Meara, senior lecturer in screenwriting at the University of Melbourne.
"We're used to seeing these people, we see thousands and thousands of images and sound bites of these artists across years and decades. But we don't usually get a view of them that knits those different perspectives together.
"Yes, you can go see the Live Aid footage for yourself – we can call up these moments on demand – but what the film offers is putting that into a neat narrative context where you can understand it."
In our current age of information overload and fractured music subcultures, a simple map through the noise is appealing to audiences, particularly younger generations.
The impact of streaming and copyrights
The rise of music streaming and social media has fundamentally altered the way people discover and consume music. An entire history of music is only a swipe or click away, and younger audiences are more aware of older artists than ever.
Heritage acts including The Beatles, Pink Floyd, Fleetwood Mac, Bob Marley, David Bowie, ABBA and Amy Winehouse remain among the bestselling artists on vinyl. And sales data shows gen Z continue to be the biggest vinyl buyers.
This has created heightened interest in the lives behind the music and the eras that shaped them. That hasn't gone unnoticed by Hollywood, which is eager to meet this increased demand.
Plus, movie studios are better equipped than ever to gain access to what used to be a hurdle for biopics: rights to an artist's life and music.
Films that failed to license their subjects' music are typically dismissed as in-authentic, including the largely forgotten 2020 David Bowie biopic Stardust or 2013's Jimi: All Is by My Side, starring André "3000" Benjamin.
Corporate consolidation across media industries in the past decade has actually helped streamline the typically complicated web of contracts and ownership.
Media corporations are always looking for more ways to make money off their creative folios, and what better source of profit than musicians with decades-long popularity and ready-made audiences?
"These days, Hollywood is very obsessed with making new versions of something they already own the rights to," says O'Meara.
Additionally, artists and labels are more flexible to granting permissions in the wake of successes like Bohemian Rhapsody and Bob Marley: One Love – celebratory biopics that renew their artist's cultural relevance, open them up to new audiences, and offer new sources of income at a time when record sales and traditional music industry revenues have declined.
However, this has bred films that feel more like tightly controlled exercises in brand management that feel largely safe, formulaic and predictable.
Sanitising superstar lives
"I wouldn't say they can't be deep or insightful, but there's such a focus on 'why this person was great' that it often papers over some of the more troublesome aspects of these stars … when we know there are lots of problems with the entertainment industry," says O'Meara.
It's a common criticism of celluloid biographies – that they rely on genre cliches and sanitised depictions that tidy up the complexities of their subjects.
"A lot of films are not willing to show the darkness," says Gaunson.
"Bob Marley was a very complex personality … but in that biopic you don't see any of those complications. You just see the great artist."
One Love is, primarily, a love story about the Jamaican music legend and his wife, Rita Marley, with whom he had five children before his untimely death in 1981.
But the film conveniently downplays that the pair both had numerous affairs throughout their marriage, along with the fact Bob fathered six other children with six other women, in favour of a sentimental screen romance.
Similarly, Amy Winehouse biopic Back to Black (which has been savaged online from announcement through to its release) anchors the rise and tragic death of the British singer around her troubled relationship with ex-husband Blake Fielder-Civil.
The film flattens out the problematic elements, including the role Fielder-Civil played in the substance abuse that contributed to Winehouse's death at age 27, Winehouse a victim of addiction, bulimia, and a punching bag for the British tabloids.
That story is told in (sometimes uncomfortable) detail in Asif Kapadia's Oscar-winning 2015 documentary, Amy. In that film, Winehouse's father, Mitch, doesn't come out looking great either: He's depicted as a controlling, profiteering presence.
He publicly and repeatedly denounced the "horrible" documentary but gave Back to Black his full support. In it, he is – surprise, surprise — portrayed by Eddie Marsan as a doting, loving father.
Neither Winehouse's father nor ex-partner Fielder-Civil are vilified much in the biopic because, as director Sam Taylor-Johnson told The Guardian, she doesn't believe in "stupid one-dimensional demon" characters.
It's common for movie dramatisations to fudge chronology and breeze past key points. But it can be misleading to twist, or worse erase, the truth in service of a good yarn.
There are concerns the upcoming Michael Jackson biopic – like the jukebox musical that opened in London's West End earlier this month – will ignore the allegations of child sexual abuse showcased in the 2019 documentary Leaving Neverland.
Will John Lennon's entry in the four Beatles biopics cover the ugly side of his life, such as admitting he abused his first wife, Cynthia Lennon, and cheated on his second, Yoko Ono? We don't know, but precedent suggests it's unlikely.
Could quantity hurt quality?
The comparison between the proliferation of comic book movies and musical biopics is fitting.
Both genres are, essentially, tales of ordinary people achieving extraordinary feats. There's even a healthy argument to be made that The Beatles and Michael Jackson are as culturally embedded and timeless as Batman and Spiderman.
But despite the MCU paving the way for superhero blockbusters to dominate cineplexes for nearly two decades, audience fatigue is setting in due to over-saturation and over-reliance on formula.
The current musical biopic boom risks the same fate.
"Once fans feel like they're being exploited, they'll stop participating," Gaunson says.
"I think we're going to get some really shonky biopics coming out, and too many of them. Audiences could turn away from that and it could be the end of this current cycle."
For now, this breed of biopic isn't going anywhere. And as long as they're putting the music back in people's hearts, minds, and playlists, are a few flawed movies really such a bad thing?