Should Movie Musicals Aim Smaller?

Introducing Endless Mode: A New Games & Anime Site from Paste

Read our announcement | See the 10 Best Games of 2025 (So Far)

Listen to this article

Wicked, which was released last November to massive box office success, is a movie musical defined by spectacle and scale. The film lavishes in all the details that couldn’t be fully captured on stage: the ornate halls of Shiz—the prestigious school that both Elphaba and Glinda attend—the lush, cozy Munchkinland, and the glittering streets of the Emerald City. The musical numbers are similarly extravagant, full of complicated choreography with lots of dancers spilling into multiple locations. But despite the costumes, richly saturated colors, and crowded cast, there’s something a bit empty about the Wicked movie that speaks to a larger problem with movie musicals. As they increasingly aim for high spectacle, they emphasize all the ways that the medium of film fails to capture the vitality of a work typically designed for the stage.

A stage musical has a very specific energy that’s tied to live performance and the connection that can form between the actors and the audience. Inevitably, a movie musical will never fully capture the energy of a live performance. This isn’t to say that movie musicals are always doomed to fail. The category, although difficult, has existed for a long time, and includes some of the most popular classic films ever made—think The Wizard of Oz or Singin’ in the Rain. But these movies understand, on some level, that they are different from something performed on a stage, and that their charm comes from someplace else.

Recent movie musicals share Wicked’s impulse toward spectacle: The Color Purple (2023), West Side Story (2021), and In the Heights (2021) all have large casts and dance numbers that attempt to simulate the awe-inspiring effect of live performances. Visually, spectacle makes sense for a movie musical, as the tendency to break out into song and dance already makes plots and characters feel a bit larger than life. In many cases—especially In the Heights, which, like Wicked and its upcoming sequel, Wicked: For Good, is directed by Jon M. Chu—spectacle makes for a thrilling viewing experience. But when a film makes spectacle the primary goal, it risks leaving more important things behind.

Most Popular

Take the classic Wicked song “The Wizard and I,” where Elphaba expresses her dream of meeting the famous wizard, but more importantly exposes a deep-rooted desire for belonging and acceptance after a lifetime of ostracism. In the stage musical, the number is typically staged simply, giving space for the performer who plays Elphaba to fully command the number. The whole point is that the number is a performance; it’s Elphaba’s first opportunity to express herself, undiluted, to a captive audience. In the movie, on the other hand, Elphaba runs around the beautiful Shiz campus, the number culminating as she bursts out into an enormous field and runs to the edge of a cliff. The camera pans out as she delivers the final, triumphant line of the song. Elphaba isn’t allowed to simply perform the song; she must instead be doing something, and the film’s attempt to hide the inherently performative nature of the number by leveraging its grandiose set distracts from what should be an intimate moment.

Maybe it’s a bit pointless to criticize movie musicals—especially those adapted from stage musicals—for their inevitable failure to translate the theatricality of the stage. But there seems to be a connection between this failure and the impulse toward spectacle that happens in mainstream productions. Look, the Wicked movie seems to say, we know that this filmed version of an immensely talented actor singing “The Wizard and I” can’t compare to the experience of seeing it performed live on stage, but look how awesome our set is! Look at this river! Look at how big that field is! Spectacle functions as a fan service distraction from a more fundamental hole at the center of the film.

It’s possible, but rarer, for movie musicals to aim small. Perhaps the best example of a small scale movie musical is 2007’s Once, which follows two struggling musicians who fall in love. The film, made with a tiny budget, was praised for its simplicity. It’s an extreme example of what movie musicals can be when they set spectacle aside in favor of focusing on the music and emotionally honest storytelling. That approach doesn’t work for every musical, but the success of Once demonstrates that big budget flair isn’t a requirement, and that it certainly isn’t the ideal solution for making musicals work on screen. While Wicked, along with many other movie musicals, is an adaptation of a beloved stage musical, Once is an example of the inverse—a stage musical was adapted from the film in 2011.

Wicked: For Good is set to premiere this November, and its extravagance will no doubt be impressive. The sequel will pick up after the climactic “Defying Gravity” scene that concludes the first movie, which is yet another example of the film dialing up the spectacle of a moment that was already designed to be awe-inspiring on stage—if in the stage musical Elphaba levitates a few feet above the ground, than in the film she must of course soar dramatically above a CGI-rendered Emerald City, only after first plunging rapidly downwards and seeing a reflection of her childhood self in one of the shiny buildings. On one hand, this is the sort of thing people, and especially longtime fans of the musical, might expect from a film adaptation of Wicked: boundless grandiosity and visual drama, a vivid elaboration on a beloved world and characters. On the other, the over-the-top nature of the sequence is a reminder of how much simpler it was to achieve the same kind of awe on stage. We already know that high-spectacle movie musicals can be done and that they can be plenty fun to watch. Maybe it’s time to see more movie musicals—adapted or original—aim smaller and find their voice without the assistance of high-octane visuals and special effects.