‘Tommy,’ ‘The Wall’ & Beyond: A Look at 55-Plus Years of Films Based on Albums

On May 16, The Weeknd will bring his album Hurry Up Tomorrow, which topped the Billboard 200, to the big screen as a suspense thriller. Tomorrow has precedents in many yesterdays: Artists have been making movies out of albums, partly to boost their sales, for decades. March 19 marked the 50th anniversary of the premiere of The Who’s Tommy. But The Who wasn’t first — and it certainly wasn’t the last.

Anything You Want

“Arlo Guthrie is about to become The Thing to talk and write about,” trumpeted an ad in the Aug. 23, 1968, Billboard for the just-released Alice’s Restaurant movie based on his 1967 album of the same name. Soon, Guthrie’s name was littering the pages of Billboard, and a piece in the Oct. 18 issue said the film “sparked sales for the Reprise album … racking up $1 million sales.” A month later, the Nov. 15 issue showed the set at a new chart peak of No. 17 on the Billboard 200, two years after its release.

See It, Feel It, Buy It

Six years after The Who released Tommy, the British rockers followed it with a 1975 film starring Roger Daltrey as the titular pinball wizard. The Ken Russell movie was divisive: The March 29, 1975, Billboard ran two reviews. One praised it as a “gripping fantasmagoria,” while another panned it as a “travesty of worn-out symbolism and general tackiness.” The same issue also reported on “the record war between the original rock opera and the movie soundtrack,” which were on MCA and Polydor, respectively. Buyers bought in, pushing the soundtrack to No. 2 on the Billboard 200, above the original album’s No. 4 peak.

Band From the ‘Club’

When the Bee Gees’ 1978 jukebox musical Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band hit theaters, expectations were as high as Lucy in the sky. The July 29, 1978, Billboard reported that the soundtrack of Beatles covers was “taxing virtually every record presser, jacket printing facility and freight company contracted to get the initial order of four million units in the hands of consumers.” A report from an advance screening told a different story: “A movie where the audience laughs at all the wrong moments is in trouble, no matter what its advertising budget.” It was a boon for The Beatles, at least: “Sales of Capitol’s Beatles catalog are surging,” according to the Aug. 26 issue.

Hitting a ‘Wall’

Pink Floyd’s The Wall, Billboard’s No. 1 album of 1980, famously inspired an animated film of the same name. Unfortunately, critics wanted to run like hell. “The $10 million movie adaptation of Pink Floyd’s international double-album bestseller was demolished” at a London premiere, reported the Aug. 7, 1982, issue. Despite an end-credits promise of a forthcoming soundtrack, one never appeared. “We intended to make a soundtrack album,” David Gilmour told the Sept. 18 Billboard. “But we just didn’t have enough new music to reasonably justify putting one out.”

This story originally appeared in the March 22, 2025 issue of Billboard.

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