Music and Film: When Music Goes Big Screen

I love good music and I love good movies so when the two are combined I am elated, but how much love do musicals (or films with a basis of music) really receive from the rest of the world? I am a self-proclaimed music-movie addict. My attention is involuntarily drawn to the television whenever a movie like The Five Heartbeats, Cadillac Records, Ray, or Idlewild is showing. Music is used in most movies to, “affect how the audience interprets what they see”.2 Biographical films such as Ray or Lady Sings the Blues, unavoidably, include songs as crucial parts of the life stories of Ray Charles and Billie Holiday, but the gross of musicals or music related films suggest it is the content of the movie and not the music or musician starred in the film that people are paying to see. Despite the film Cadillac Records co-starring, arguably, “the” top R&B female artist in the world Beyonce Knowles playing the role of Etta James, the movie only grossed close to $9 million. Similarly Lady Sings the Blues and The Wiz, films that starred the incomparable and original diva Diana Ross, made little or no profit. Although the film Ray took over a decade to be made due to securing the $40 million for production, it grossed over $120 million at the box office. In the past two years, 2013 and 2014, it is the animated musical films that are leading in the box office; Rio 2 grossed nearly half of a billion dollars and Frozen has been rated the highest grossing animated film ever making over $1.2 billion.  From these findings one could conclude that people pay to watch films for their content more so than for the actors or soundtrack, but the children of the world and children at heart love the combination of music and film most in an animated format. 

2. Fisher, J. P. (2009). Soundtrack Success : A Digital Storyteller's Guide to Audio-post Production. Boston, Mass: Course.