Since the popularization of musical biopics with Academy hits like Rocketman and Bohemian Rhapsody, it’s become increasingly obvious that Hollywood has found its next cookie-cutter shape. While finding out which stars can sing is interesting, the vast majority of musical biopics often fall short at the box office.
This influx of unsolicited biopics revives the debate over whether what critics want is the same as what the audience wants.
so, What’s the problem?
Recent biopics have made me question the decisions behind making a full-length feature film about regular celebrities who aren’t actually that interesting, especially when there are already existing documentaries. If you have to add massive amounts of drama to a story to make it watchable on a large scale, it’s unfortunately probably not a great story to tell.
While I would call myself a classic rock junkie, I’ve never felt the desire to drop $20 to go see a musical biopic about any artist in my playlists or CD collection. Recent musical biopics, like Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, Song Sung Blue, Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance with Somebody, and A Complete Unknown, seem to rely more on nostalgia to reel in smaller audiences that definitely lean more towards an older demographic.
I think that the reason many of these films struggle to bring in younger audiences is that those audience members weren’t alive to actually develop a relationship with the artist. Young fans often feel more connected to the actual music and don’t have a vested interest in a film that dramatizes the life of the artist to almost untruthful extents, as in the case of Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance with Somebody and Straight Outta Compton.
It’s hard to resonate with a musician when your only relationship with them is that vintage shirt you got from Depop with their album cover on it.
Recent musical biopics also seem to have neglected any hint of diversity in their deeper meanings and plots. 2019’s Rocketman centered the LGBTQ+ experience in the storyline, and while Bohemian Rhapsody’s portrayal of Freddie Mercury’s bisexuality did come under fire for glancing over it, the film itself had powerful messages about self-acceptance and inclusivity.
Comparatively, the themes of recent musical biopics seem rather surface-level. Each of these centers on the struggles of straight white men in the music industry and often forces any important women into the role of the love interest, like Joan Baez in A Complete Unknown.
By continuously boosting stale and similar stories about singers and songwriters who have long since appeared on any store shelves, audiences are left with shallow, dramatized, borderline fictional accounts of musicians’ lives that aren’t really that compelling.
Why are there so many biopics?
It mostly comes down to how cheap biopics are compared to other feature films. A biopic about an Average Joe from your dad’s Spotify playlist is bound to require fewer advanced effects or large sets than the next superhero flick.
Some cinephiles think the biopic craze is related to media companies buying the rights to older music and boosting sales using what is essentially a two-hour-long music video made for IMAX.
Since musical biopics are normally about an artist who was very popular at one point, there’s a guaranteed audience of people who feel obligated to show up because they end up in that artist’s top 10% on Spotify Wrapped every year.
Another potential reason is rooted in the amount of acclaim that biopics receive during award season. A Complete Unknown collected a total of eight Oscar nominations for 2025, and Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere is in a good place with the critics to pick up some nominations in 2026.
If biopics continue to be so successful, it makes sense that studios are jumping on the cash-grab Oscar-bait train. Why wouldn’t they, when the easiest way to the Academy’s heart is with this simple three-step recipe for guaranteed success?
At the end of the day, thousands of documentaries should suffice if you’ve got an itch for learning about a specific musician, and none of them make you sit through two hours of this year’s most popular male actor failing to look anything like the subject of the film. There simply doesn’t need to be as many musical biopics as there are.
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