Musician Biopics Must Evolve to Keep Rocking On

For a while there, it looked like the musician biopic had fizzled out. At the start of the 2010s, the handful of music biopics that did hit movie theaters like The Runaways or Get on Up didn’t make waves at the box office, seemingly ensuring that Hollywood wouldn’t have any reason to resurrect this subgenre full-time. But then Straight Outta Compton became a box office sensation in 2015, followed by Bohemian Rhapsody in 2018 becoming the fourth-biggest 20th Century Fox movie ever worldwide. With Freddie Mercury securing the kind of box office haul usually reserved for Marvel superheroes, there was no denying it: the music biopic was back.