Heavily influenced by vaudeville, comic opera, and other performing arts, musicals as we know them emerged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Around this time, writers shifted from creating comedy and variety shows to stage dramas that integrated story, character, song, and dance while grappling with more mature subject matter.
Shows like “Oklahoma!” and “Show Boat” epitomized these qualities. When “Show Boat” 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.
To celebrate the “Wicked” premiere and the broader movie musical genre, Stacker ranked 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. Ties were broken by the number of IMDb votes. This list only includes films that are stage-to-screen musical adaptations, so films that later received a stage adaptation (like “The Lion King” or “Moulin Rouge!”) or are strictly screen musicals (like “La La Land” or “Joker: Folie à Deux”) were not considered.
Read on to discover the all-time best movie musicals adapted from theatrical stage productions.
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