With “Joker 2” and “Emilia Perez”, is the musical making its big comeback?

With Jacques Audiard’s film, “Emilia Perez”, selected to represent France at the Oscars, and “Joker 2”, set to music by Lady Gaga, the musical seems to be making a comeback this fall at the cinema. Is this the sign of a real return of flame for a genre that has long been shunned?

Joker: Folie à deux is it a musical? “I wouldn’t say it’s one strictly speaking.“, said Lady Gaga, who knows her way around musical films, at the Venice Festival. This mega pop star who no longer has anything to prove on stage, broke through on the big screen thanks to the film A Star is Born, by Bradley Cooper, in 2018, in which she played the role of a beginner singer.

In this new episode of Joker, the music is omnipresent around the couple that his character forms with the antihero, played by Joaquin Phoenix. “We use music to really give the characters a way to express what they have to say because going through dialogue is not enough“, she explained.

But unlike the canons of the genre, this film opts for a more natural rendering: the songs were sung live on the set and Lady Gaga confided that she had “unlearned to sing, forgotten how to breathe“. Imperfection must be felt – and is felt – on screen.

The classics of the musical comedy, the filmmaker Jacques Audiard also subverts them in Emilia Perez, filmed to the sound of reggaeton and punctuated by clip-style choreography, who has just been chosen to represent France at the next Oscars ceremony, on March 2, 2025.

The film, which tells the story of a Mexican drug lord who changes his life and becomes a woman, won the Jury Prize at Cannes and a collective acting prize for its three main actresses: Zoe Saldaña, the pop star Selena Gomez and transgender actress Karla Sofía Gascón.

Writing, “I didn’t know if we were doing a musical or an opera“, confided Jacques Audiard. “We didn’t want to go into the official codes of the musical“, added his choreographer, Damien Jalet.

More classically, the Hollywood industry continues to regularly rely on the musical genre, with results that are difficult to predict at the box office: successes of Mamma Mia! Moulin Rouge, La La Land, to the failure of the remake of West Side Story by Steven Spielberg in 2021.

The genre is costly, both in terms of time and money. “There are a lot of recordings and re-recordings of songs, playbacks. A lot of titles go in the trash“, testified Jacques Audiard.

Among the successes, the film Wonka, inspired by the universe of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, allowed us to discover the vocal talents of Timothée Chalamet and filled the rooms. The end of the year will be marked by the release of Wickedadaptation of a Broadway hit starring Ariana Grande, Cynthia Erivo and Jeff Goldblum.

“However, we remain a long way from the golden age of musical comedies, in the 1930s to 1950s, with hundreds of films of the genre. Today, it remains an exception but perfect for depicting characters bigger than life (out of the ordinary)“, underlines to AFP Alexis Lormeau, author of Sing and dance at the cinema (Apprimery).

In the end, “few films“are real musical comedies, with songs integrated into the narration and dance scenes, adds Isabelle Wolgust, author of Dictionary of musical comedy (Editions Rouge Profond).

Is the public allergic to genre? Not necessarily, replies the specialist, who emphasizes that the consumption of series like Glee has changed habits. And if classic musicals are generally inspired by successes on stage, the converse also exists. French director Mathieu Kassovitz, who is adapting the film Punch from October 10 Hate on stage, believes in it and promises a musical comedy that is anything but “cheesy”: “We try to break it all up a little and not necessarily respect the rules and customs of this format“, he explained to AFP.