![]() Director: Jon Favreau Year Of Release: 2003 Plot: After crawling into Santas sack as a baby, Buddy ends up at the North Pole and is raised there as an elf, even if hes rather larger than the other elves working for Santa. As an adult he is told he is actually human and so decides to travel to New York to find his birth father, discovering the strange delights of the big city, while also realising that the real world is more difficult and less innocent than his old home. |
The Move-A-Day Project is a series of articles based on a multiude of subjects inspired by a different film each day. To find out more about the project click here, or for the full list of previous articles and future movies we’ll be covering click here.
In another of the occasional coincidences that have peppered these Movie-A-Day offerings, we get to Elf only a few days after it was announced that a musical version of the 2003 film will open on Broadway in time for Christmas. A stage version of the movie has been rumoured for quite a long time, with Matthew Sklar and Chad Beguelin working on the book and music, but its only now that its actually happening, with an initial Christmastime nine week run scheduled for this winter although if it proves to be a success, itll undoubtedly run longer.
Elf is merely the latest in a long string of films that have become stage musicals in recent years. This has led many theatre lovers to complain that Broadway and West End theatres are getting ever more stuffed with uninspired musicals based on popular movies that appeal to the lowest common denominator, and that theres therefore little room for original productions that try to do something different or that have real artistic merit. And of course there are some cases where things have gone full circle, so that the movies Hairspray and The Producers got made into Broadway shows, which were then turned back into musical films.
The reason so many musicals based on movies have come along in the last few years are the same as why so many big movies are either sequels, or based on toys, games or other well known properties. The cost of making a movie or staging a musical has soared in recent years, meaning that the risks if it flops have grown exponentially as well, and so everyone is look for a sure thing. For example, when Dreamworks decided to turn Shrek into a stage show, they were eyeing the hundreds of millions Disney made when Beauty and the Beast became one of the longest running shows ever on Broadway.
However, just to get Shrek to the New York stage cost Dreamworks around $25 million. That might not seem a huge amount compared to a movie, but the problem is that it can only run in a single theatre, limiting the amount of money it can gross. While it can expand to other cities or countries if the show becomes a success allowing it to makes huge amounts of cash initially the entire investment is reliant on the gross of a single theatre in a single city. Even so a big sold out Broadway show can pull in $1.5 million a week, which doesnt seem bad for one theatre. By that logic, Shrek should have been able to make its money back in around six months if it sold out, but of course its not that simple.
Unlike films, stage shows have running costs for actors and staff etc, and for a massive technically demanding shows, these can be enormous. For example, its believed that the New York version of Wicked costs around $800,000 to run, but if it can fill the theatre its in, itll take around $1.8 million a week. The result is that if a show is popular, the profits can be massive, but if not, the money lost can be equally as big. Despite being a big success, it took Wicked 14 months to make back the money invested in bringing it to the stage, and the fact is, relatively few musicals last that long. In its entire history, only 156 shows have ever lasted more than two years on Broadway, and of those, around a quarter are revivals of previously successful shows.
What all this means is that with a big stage musical, the profits are potentially enormous after 24 years playing around the world, Phantom Of The Opera is the highest grossing piece of entertainment ever, having made over $3 billion but only a few shows ever get to the point of breaking even. Worse than that, because of the continued large running costs, if youre not an instant hit, the longer a show runs, the more money its at risk of losing. For example, when Rosie ODonnell decided she wanted to mount a big Broadway production of George Michaels Taboo a couple of years ago, it cost $10 million to get it to opening night, however its believed it ended up losing $12 million overall, due to the low weekly grosses during its three month run, which didnt cover its overheads.
As a result of this, Broadway producers are always looking for ways to minimise the risks, and as audiences currently seem to want to big, expensive spectaculars, basing it on a popular, well loved movie seems a good way to try and find a built-in audience. The logic is that if youre spending $10-$25 million to mount a show, the core Broadway audience alone will never allow you to make your money back, and so you need to find something thats a known quantity and will lure in many more non-regular theatregoers. The theatre cognoscenti may not like that, but thats the economics of Broadway and the West End today.
All that said, while the idea of films being turned into musicals seems like a fairly recent phenomenon, it actually has a fairly venerable tradition. For example, the 1939 play The Philadelphia Story became a hit film in 1940 starring Katherine Hepburn, Cary Grant and James Stewart. That was then turned into a Cole Porter movie musical, High Society, in 1956 (with Bing Crosby, Grace Kelly and Frank Sinatra), which eventually went back to Broadway in 1988. Porter was also responsible for the 1955 stage musical Silk Stockings, based on the 1939 movie Ninotchka.
Or theres Applause, the 1970 Charles Strouse and Lee Adams musical that was based on the classic movie All About Eve, which then got made back into a movie in 1973, starring Lauren Bacall in the Bette Davis role. In 1989 Grand Hotel – The Musical opened and ran for over 1,000 performances. That was based on the 1932 Best Picture Oscar winning musical of the same name.
Even musical luminary Stephen Sondheim isnt immune, as his classic 1973 musical A Little Night Music is based on Ingmar Bergmans Smiles of a Summer Night, while his 1994 Passion was inspired by Ettore Scola’s film Passione d’Amore. Then theres Nine, which recently got made into a film starring Daniel Day Lewis, but first ran on Broadway in 1982 and is based on Fellinis movie 8 1/2. That wasnt the Italian directors only movie that ended up of Broadway, as his screenplay for Nights of Cabiria was the basis for the 1966 stage musical Sweet Charity, which became a movie starring Shirley Maclaine in 1969. Theres also Promises Promise, a 1968 musical with music by Burt Bacharach and a book by Neil Simon, which was based on Billy Wilders 1960 Oscar-winning movie, The Apartment.
Even some musicals youd assume first appeared on stage before they became films were actually movie musicals before they headed for theatres, such as Thoroughly Modern Millie, Singin In the Rain, 42nd Street, Rodgers & Hammersteins State Fair and even Seven Brides For Seven Brother.
However the kings of the modern film to stage phenomenon are Howard Ashman and Alan Menken, who first got noticed after adapting Roger Cormans 1960s b-movie, Little Shop Of Horrors, for an off-Broadway run in 1982. That got turned back into a movie starring Rick Moranis in 1986, and got the duo noticed by Disney, who hired them to write songs for the likes of The Little Mermaid, Aladdin and Beauty and the Beast. Then in 1994 Disney decided to test the waters by taking Menken and Ashmans Beauty and the Beast to Broadway, where it didnt just become a smash hit, but by the time it ended its run in 2007, it was the sixth longest running Broadway show ever and had played in 115 other cities in 13 countries.
With Andrew Lloyd Webber having success around the same time as Beauty and the Beast opened with Sunset Boulevard, as well as a new stage version of Fame and a revival of Grease, the floodgates started to open, with many others creating stage musicals based on films in the hope the movies popularity would pull in a broad audience to the stage version (films being made into musicals had been slightly out of vogue before the mid-90s, due to the 1988 disaster that was Carrie The Musical, which lost nearly $8 million after closing following just five proper performances, making it the costliest flop up to that point).
Disney has since brought the likes of The Lion King, Tarzan, Mary Poppins and The Little Mermaid to the stage, with varying results. Theres also been 9 to 5, Barbarella (written by Dave Stewart, although it only ever played in Vienna in 2004), Big, Billy Elliot, Catch Me If You Can (which has had a Seattle tryout, and is expected to move to Broadway next spring), The Color Purple, Dirty Dancing, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, Flashdance (which has toured the UK and will hit the West End in September), Footloose, The Full Monty, Grey Gardens, Hairspray, Legally Blonde, The Opposite Of Sex (which has so far only played in San Francisco), Peggy Sure Got Married, Priscilla Queen Of The Desert, The Producers, Sister Act, Spamalot (based on Monty Python and the Holy Grail), Sweet Smell Of Success, Urban Cowboy, The Wedding Singer, Whistle Down The Wind, Xanadu and Young Frankenstein.
And its hasnt ended yet, as the likes of Ghost – The Musical (in case you care, that one should be arriving in 2011) and, of course, Elf, are in the works, while a retooled version of Shrek The Musical will transfer to the West End in 2011, despite the fact it struggled on Broadway and never recouped it exorbitant costs.
Theatre purists may not like this film-to-stage phenomenon, as they feel these shows are filling up all the theatre space to the detriment of new and more daring productions, but theres little doubt that while some have failed, a large number of these musicals based on movies have proved very popular. In fact in recent years theyve had a significantly higher success rate than those not based on films (that said, a few truly original productions like In The Heights and Avenue Q have broken through in the past few years on Broadway). Undoubtedly this current fad will end at some point, but just as those in Hollywood are busy looking at every toy, videogame and comic book in the hope of minimising the risks due to the massive costs involved in making movies, at the moment Broadway producers are pillaging the film world in the hope of creating a hit that will gross hundreds of millions, rather than losing their shirts on a riskier original production.
TIM ISAAC
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