4 movie musicals in production/filmed. Wow...

I think we can expect THE BOOK OF MORMON film in the next couple of years. Scott Rudin owns the film rights and Matt and Trey recently set up their own film production company.

I don't think this is due to Les Mis success. The thing with Les Mis is it had international appeal, as it was a hit musical in multiple countries. I'm not saying the musicals above won't be successful, but they won't attract the massive audience Les Mis did.

Ever since Chicago, I feel as if there's been talk to turn most Broadway shows into movies. And like you said, tons of it is just talk and may never actually happen.

Keep in mind that there have been many recent movie musical failures (Rent, the Producers, for example). It can be hit or miss.

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did AMERICAN IDIOT w/ Billy Joe Armstrong start filming yet?

Looking at the number of movie musicals produced. The number of originals and broadway remakes hasn't really changed much since the 70s. The failure rate of about 80% is about the rate of non-musical films. It is only that there are so few that we can remember most of them. And frankly, is about the same success rate of stage shows.

Let's not forget the mother of them all.... GYPSY.

I am aware that 99.5 % of the world thinks this is dead. There is nothing I can post to sugguest otherwise. Spielberg dropped out of the snipper movie for a reason.. I believe 100% that on Thanksgiving 2014, we will see a Streisand/Spielberg/Gaga/ - production, or we won't.

As excited as I am for all the movie musical activity, I just hope and pray that Follies comes to fruition. If done well, I think it could be a true film classic for all time. Fingers crossed.

I don't think any of these will have the same amount of success that Les Mis had just because that had international appeal. These movie musicals are never as good as the actual shows. There were so many things wrong with the Les Mis movie.

Whatever happened to the Spring Awakening Movie? Weren't they suppose to start filming in the spring?

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I believe SPRING AWAKENING was supposed to be an adaptation of the play, not the musical.
I think musicals are doing just fine, there was that huge explosion that happened after CHICAGO and MOULIN ROUGE (which people often forget about, though CHICAGO went into production before MOULIN ROUGE came out, the latter was key in terms of letting Hollywood know that audiences were still in musicals, and Nicole Kidman got her first Oscar nomination from that. I think HAIRSPRAY and MAMMA MIA were so successful that they made up for the bombs that were PHANTOM OF THE OPERA, THE PRODUCERS and RENT (all bombed because they were all virtually unwatchable and poorly made, it's not like they were simply dismissed for being musicals, they were awful movies). Last year we had both LES MISERABLES and PITCH PERFECT. We just need a few of these to be successful every few years, so that they keep getting made. The trend that I noticed is that, unlike almost every other genre, movie musicals actually need to get excellent reviews to do well--except for the big exceptions like LES MIS (which was very polarizing critically) and MAMMA MIA. I can't think of a great movie musical in the 2000s that wasn't a hit--and no, I don't count SWEENEY TODD, which I think works on some levels and then completely fails on others, much like DREAMGIRLS.

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Yeah, but it sucked.

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... not to mention, Andrew Lloyd Webber put up much of the money himself for the film. Warner Bros. distributed it (because Really Useful doesn't have a distribution arm), and they promoted it. But the film's financing came from Webber, which gave him creative control and final say on everything (a mistake, since he's not a filmmaker or film director or producer), but he took a huge personal hit in the wallet as a result.

The biggest mistake? Hiring Joel Schumacher, who made one hideous decision after another while Webber just thought it was "so cool" and kept nodding his head.

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Obviously, we'll never know and whatever we write is speculation, but I cannot imagine anyone involved with PHANTOM made any money. Who knows? Maybe they did. I will say though, that after the poor showing of that movie, studios took pause when it came to spending that much money on a huge production like PHANTOM, which should have been a massive hit (much like LES MIS was).
Besty, thanks for bringing up the atrocious direction by Joel Schumacher. I couldn't believe how bad that movie was when I saw it, the casting of Emily Rossum as a star opera singer was a huge misstep, Gerard Butler was laughably campy, and the movie was just dead from beginning to end, never actually creating anything remote to excitement, let alone complexity. I wanted to walk out so badly. Luckily, it was overshadowed by the even more atrocious adaptations of RENT and THE PRODUCERS, the latter ranking as one of the worst movies I've ever seen at a movie theatre.

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