From stage to screen: 13 of the best movie musicals adapted from Broadway hits
opened in the late 1920s, talking pictures were taking the nation by storm, most notably through 1927’s “The Jazz Singer,” the first musical movie.
From the inception of talkies through the 1960s, the movie musical, often adapted from successful Broadway shows, was one of the most popular film genres.Although the genre began to wane in popularity from the 1970s through the 1990s, the one-two punch of screen original “Moulin Rouge!” (now a smash Broadway hit) and “Chicago” in the early 2000s brought about a resurgence in popularity for the musical film genre that remains to this day, with at least one major movie musical released annually.In the 21st century, the most anticipated movie musicals tend to be big-screen adaptations of Broadway hits—think 2007’s “Sweeney Todd” or 2012’s “Les Misérables”—which can often take years to develop.
The long-awaited adaptation of Stephen Schwartz’s “Wicked”—a show that has remained on Broadway for over 20 years—took over a decade to make.
The filmmakers opted to split the story of the witches of Oz into two feature films, the first of which opens nationwide just in time for this year’s Thanksgiving, while “Part Two” will come to theaters during 2025’s holiday season.Our newsletter is like a refreshing cocktail (or mocktail) of LGBTQ+ entertainment and pop culture, served up with a side of eye-candy.To celebrate the “Wicked” premiere and the broader movie musical genre, our friends at Stacker ranked 13 of the best stage-to-screen musicals of all time using a Stacker score—a weighted index split evenly between IMDb and Metacritic scores.The film had to have a “musical” listing on IMDb, a Metascore, and at least 10,000 votes to qualify.
