Can You Still Make A Good Musical Biopic? (Re-Release)

A note from us: we spent the past two weeks going through your survey responses — thank you to everyone who filled it in. Winners will be contacted this week. We’re working on what comes next, but we didn’t want to leave you hanging.

Last year it was A Complete Unknown, Better Man, Maria, this year it’s now Michael Jackson. The musical biopic is back again, with all its cliches.

We recorded this conversation when A Complete Unknown hit cinemas. Hosts Laura Gommans and Hugo Emmerzael ask what it takes to make a great musical biopic — a genre too often content with greatest-hits storytelling: the origin-story childhood, the long climb, the fall, the redemption arc that arrives whether the life earned one or not. Cinema can do stranger, more honest things with a life. Why doesn’t it?

We revisit the films that actually break the formula, ask why audiences keep returning to the glossy reenactment, and consider what the genre would look like if it stopped playing it safe.

With MJ arriving this month, it felt like the right moment to bring this one back.