Have We Reached Peak Music Biopic?
Written by djfrosty on November 26, 2024
When Brookfield Asset Management invested $2 billion in Primary Wave roughly two years ago, a representative from the Canadian fund predicted that just as there has been a wave of comic book superhero movies, there would a wave of musician biopics.
“Music is going to be like the Marvel and DC comic catalogs,” Angelo Ruffino, who was then the managing partner at Brookfield behind the Primary Wave investment, said in October 2022. “There are just so many ways to monetize music that I think are in the early innings.”
Hollywood has churned out superhero films, from Batman to Black Panther, but the genre has been drawing smaller audiences of late. With a flurry of music biopics set for release in the next few years — including feature films about Bob Dylan, Michael Jackson, Bruce Springsteen, Queen Latifah, four films about each member of The Beatles, and maybe one about The Bee Gees — have we reached peak biopic?
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The top post on Reddit’s subreddit page about Dylan as of this writing is titled, “On not being interested in A Complete Unknown,” and it is far from the only gripe about dramatizations of currently touring musicians on the Internet.
However many factors are contributing to a packed pipeline of musician biopics, and consumer demand just one. By that measure, many recent music biopics have been hits. About half of the 25 highest grossing music biopics of all time, according to boxofficemojo.com, were released since 2014, with Bohemian Rhapsody about Queen at No. 1 with $216.4 million, Straight Outta Compton about N.W.A. at No. 2 with $161.2 million and Elvis at No. 3 with $151 million all in gross revenue in the United States.
Natalia Nastaskin, chief content officer at Primary Wave, which as involved with the 2022 release “Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance With Somebody”—No. 24 in the top 25 grossing biopics—says demand remains high. But the years it can take to land the starring actors, directors and producers essential to making a hit movie may mean these films continue to trickle out over the coming years.
“I do think we are going to see more of these biopics because we are always fascinated by the stories of our rock stars and the behind-the-scenes story of their lives,” Nastaskin tells Billboard. “How many more biopics will we see? Really hitting that cultural zeitgeist may take several years.”
Primary Wave is currently involved in biopics about Boyz II Men and Boy George—both in production.
Another factor that has the potential to disrupt the normal line between demand and supply are the different ways Hollywood and the music industry make money off these films. Hollywood defines a successful movie by the revenue it grosses; the music industry is more interested in how it drives moviegoers to stream the music, buy merch and the tangential licensing opportunities delivered by the music’s resurging relevance.
By those definitions, Elvis was a smash. All of the activity that the Baz Luhrmann biopic drove for Elvis’s music and brand boosted the Presley estate’s estimated value to around $1 billion 2022 from an estimated $400 million to $600 million in 2020.
It may take years to measure the impact of Timothée Chalamet’s portrayal of Bob Dylan on his catalog, at least until 2025, which is when the Michael Jackson biopic is slated for release. With The Beatles films expected in 2027, there seems like no shortage of musician biopics to come.