The Music Biopic Phenomenon: and Why Studios Need to Stop Making Them
Issue 3
The Music Biopic Phenomenon: and Why Studios Need to Stop Making Them
I sat down recently to watch the Bruce Springsteen biopic Deliver Me From Nowhere, starring Jeremy Allen White as the titular rockstar. I didn’t (and still don’t really) know a lot about Springsteen, but I thought, seeing as they had made a whole film about him, his story must be a somewhat interesting one, right?
Well, in short, not really. I thought that White’s performance was great, and it was interesting to look at Springsteen’s issues with mental health and specifically depression in both his personal and professional life (especially when he moved to L.A and ended up contemplating suicide, as well as how it affected his romantic relationships). However,I just couldn’t see what happened in this period of his life that constituted making an entire film about it. Deliver Me From Nowhere covers around just a year of his decade-spanning career, in which he made the folk album Nebraska, and there is just nothing particularly interesting or memorable, in my opinion, that happens within this year of his life, and if there was, it wasn’t shown in this film.
This got me thinking about the biopic genre in general, especially those about musicians. In the last ten years or so, the genre has exploded, with the first major film coming to mind being the Queen biopic Bohemian Rhapsody, which was released in 2018 to both critical and commercial acclaim. Since then, it seems as if anyone and everyone has had a film made about their lives, and this is only set to continue over the next couple of years, with films coming out about Michael Jackson and The Beatles, to name just a couple.
Although a lot of these biopics do see success, such as Rocketman, Elvis and A Complete Unknown, there has been a fair amount of flops for the genre, such as Back To Black and the Robbie Williams, CGI monkey-led Better Man. But why is it that certain biopics are smash hits, and others barely make a dent in the box office?
I think the problem is that it seems as if studios will quite literally make a biopic about anyone. In a generation of cinema that is dominated by existing IP’s, franchises, reboots, sequels and adaptations, making a film about a subject with a pre-existing fanbase seems both naturally appealing and an easy way to make a lot of money. In addition to this, a lot of the time the films and the subjects in which they are about essentially cross promote each other.
For example, take Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis biopic released in 2022. Speaking as someone that worked in a cinema at the time when this film was released, showings of it sold out every night and most audience members had only positive things to say about the film. Viewers consisted of not only longtime Elvis fans back from when he was still alive, which created a guaranteed audience for the film and therefore guaranteed commercial success, but also a shockingly large number of young people, who from watching this film discovered their new favourite singer. To many of these younger viewers, they may have been enticed by the Luhrmann name or just simply picked what looked like the most interesting film on at the cinema, but ultimately they left as a fan of Elvis.
I think another key reason as to whether a biopic does well is quite honestly how long the subject has been dead for. Elvis Presley died such a long time ago that he has evolved into this ‘legend’ status that immediately makes his story more intriguing and even more cinematic to an audience, whereas someone like Robbie Williams who, despite having a fairly interesting backstory, is still alive and well. Therefore, how can he have a biographical film of his life made when he still has so much of it to live? This brings me back to the film I initially started talking about (Deliver Me From Nowhere), which begs the same question of how can a retrospective film of someone’s life be made when they are still alive?
Overall, I believe that the biopic fatigue is very much a real thing. So many of them have been released in the last decade that it feels as though everyone has had one made about them. Whilst I do enjoy watching some of them, they are definitely often very repetitive and formulaic, and in my opinion often come across as a cash grab for the artist or their estate. To keep the genre alive and help get its spark back, it’s crucial that Hollywood is more selective with the celebrities that they deem worthy of having their life story on the big screen.