Is Sweeney Todd a musical or not?

Posted by Chris

November 23, 2007

I keep reading people who seem to believe Dreamworks/Paramount is hiding the fact that Tim Burton’s Sweeney Todd is a musical.

These people are obviously high.

If you’ll recall, the first trailer for the movie showed off a bit of star Johnny Depp singing. Was it the centerpiece of the trailer? No, but it was the first trailer and so had to also accomplish the goal of letting people know what the movie’s story was. It didn’t try to hide it, exactly, which is the impression you’d get from some of the commentary floating around online.

The international trailer didn’t include any singing at all, so Warner Bros (which is handling international distribution) seems to have little to no faith in being able to draw an audience to a gothic musical. At least Dreamamount had the courage to display part of the movie as it is.

Now Anne Thompson links to a video Paraworks has released showing Johnny Depp in the recording studio, intermixed with footage from the movie. The message, as subtle as it might be, is that THIS IS A MUSICAL AND LOOK HOW BRAVE JOHNNY DEPP WAS TO TAKE A ROLE THAT REQUIRED HIM TO SING BECAUSE IT’S A MUSICAL AND HE WASN’T SURE HE’D BE ABLE TO DO IT BUT IT’S A MUSICAL AND HE FIGURED WHAT THE HECK IT WAS BETTER THAN NOT TRYING TO DO A MUSICAL FOR A CHANGE.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-RPsn5NP0s[/youtube]

See…it’s a musical.

I don’t think the studio is trying to hide the fact that it’s a musical so much as they’re not sure what to do with the fact that it’s not something that’s an obvious crowd-pleaser like Hairspray or Chicago. It’s not uplifting, it’s not showy. Instead it seems to be appropriately dark and depressing, about a man locked in jail wrongly for years who decides to exact revenge on the people who stole his family.

Anne mentions that Para/Dream seems to be aiming this movie squarely at a mainstream audience and I think that’s a horrible mistake. This is not a mainstream movie. The studio would do better, I think, to go niche with a campaign that was meant to appeal to the hardcore Stephen Sondheim fans and the hardcore Tim Burton fans since activating those two communities – and then supporting that with a distribution platform that will reach those groups - would be much more likely, I think, to lead to success than a huge, mainstream release that will sink the movie because of poor per-screen incomes.

If the studio is looking to the Chicago or Hairspray campaigns as precedents for achieving musical nirvana, I think they’re going to be disappointed. Look at Rent. They tried to go mainstream with a niche film and it didn’t work out like they thought it would.

Embrace the niche.