Hollywood musicals are now in a position to put their musical numbers front-and-center.
‚Mary Poppins Returns‘ Walt Disney
Walt Disney dropped this new preview of Mary Poppins Returns 13 hours ago, or right as I was watching Widows. Brief digression: Widows is an excellent piece of studio genre fare. What’s notable about this glimpse is that it is very much about highlighting the music and the original songs. As much as we like to talk about how marketing seems to hide the notion that their live-action musical is actually a musical, the songs here are front-and-center. And after the last few years, why wouldn’t they be?
For the record, this marketing isn’t that different from Walt Disney’s Frozen, which slowly teased its music and songs as the release date got closer, a successful strategy that led folks to falsely claim that it was hiding both the fact that it was a musical and the fact that it was a female-centric princess fairy tale. Again, both notions are false, but you still have people swearing that Warner Bros. intentionally undersold Wonder Woman even after the film opened with $225m worldwide. But I digress.
As A Star is Born crosses $200 million worldwide and The Greatest Showman gets a cover album, we yet again have solid evidence that the musical is a vibrant and commercially viable genre. In an era when folks only go to the movies when there is something that they want to see and when the movie they want to see is deemed worthy of a big-screen experience, the splashy musical, animated or live-action, is indeed deemed as worthy, relatively speaking, as a comic book superhero movie and buzzy horror flick.
As I like to mention, just in the last 12 years, we’ve had Paramount/Viacom Inc.’s Dreamgirls ($155 million worldwide), New Line Cinema’s Hairspray ($202m), Paramount’s Sweeney Todd ($152m), Universal’s Mamma Mia! ($609m), Universal’s Les Misérables ($441m), Sony’s Annie ($133m), Walt Disney’s Into the Woods ($213m) and Disney’s Beauty and the Beast ($1.263 billion). And those are just the ones based on popular Broadway plays. Okay, Beauty and the Beast is based on the 1991 animated flick, but it also takes cues from the long-running stage show version as well.
Between 2007 and 2018, in the realm of original (or not based on a stage show), we’ve had Disney’s Enchanted ($340 million), Disney’s High School Musical 3 ($252m), Sony’s Burlesque ($89m), Disney’s The Muppets ($155m), Lionsgate’s La Land ($446m), Fox’s insanely leggy The Greatest Showman ($434m) and A Star Is Born ($205m-and-counting). Universal’s Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again ($392 million) is an original sequel to a movie that was an adaptation of a hit stage show. But either way, it counts as a win.
Mary Poppins Returns is probably closest to Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again. It is an original musical sequel to a popular musical motion picture that itself was adapted from a prior source. No, the P. L. Travers-penned book didn’t have original music, and the Mamma Mia films are covers of existing Abba songs. Mary Poppins Returns, being a sequel to a 54-year-old predecessor, doesn’t have a bunch of returning vets from the first movie (Dick Van Dyke appearance notwithstanding), but the shoe almost fits.
Lin-Manuel Miranda, Emily Mortimer, Julie Walters, Emily Blunt, Pixie Davies, Nathanael Saleh, and Joel Dawson in ‚Mary Poppins Returns‘ (2018) Photo by Photo Credit: Jay Maidment – © 2017 Disney Enterprises, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Since it’s partially animated, it may join the likes of Frozen ($1.276 billion), Trolls ($347 million), Moana ($643m), Sing ($634m), Coco ($807m) and Smallfoot ($138m-and-counting). Its existence as a female-led, family-friendly musical melodrama will help it stand out during an insanely crowded Christmas, especially alongside actioners like Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, Bumblebee and Aquaman. Oh, and there is a long history of successful family-friendly musicals (sorry, Nine) opening and legging it out over the Christmas season. There’s a reason Disney kept Mary Poppins Returns in Christmas instead of moving Solo.
It was just 11 years ago that we had angry patrons demanding a refund because they walked into Tim Burton’s Sweeney Todd without realizing that it was a musical. Now, partially thanks to Frozen and partially thanks to the live-action musicals ( A Star Is Born, La Land, etc.) that turned their songs into hits even before the movies opened (and shows like Glee that turned their covers into iTunes sensations), Disney is right to put those songs front-and-center over the last two months of the Mary Poppins Returns marketing blitz.
The presence of actors singing has gone from something to hide to something to brag about. And I will presume Walt Disney is smart enough not to give away all the musical moments prior to release. Either way, Rob Marshall’s Mary Poppins Returns, starring Emily Blunt, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Ben Whishaw, Emily Mortimer, Julie Walters, Colin Firth, Meryl Streep and Dick Van Dyke, opens Dec. 19,2018. It will feature music by Marc Shaiman and new songs by Shaiman with lyrics by Shaiman and Scott Wittman. As always, we’ll see.
I’ve studied the film industry, both academically and informally, and with an emphasis in box office analysis, for 28 years. I have extensively written about all of said subjects for the last ten years. My outlets for film criticism, box office commentary, and film-skewing s…
If you like what you’re reading, follow @ScottMendelson on Twitter, and „like“ The Ticket Booth on Facebook. Also, check out my archives for older work HERE.