With the news that a film based on the songs of Prince is in the works, Hollywood is about to write another enthralling chapter in the ongoing saga that sees it plunder any recognisable brand for a new movie. Reports have emerged that “Universal Pictures has picked up the rights to a number of classic songs that will form the basis of a fictional big-screen musical.” We go on to learn that producers and execs are aiming for “the style of Mamma Mia!”.
The first aspect requiring examination here is the trend of film-makers and TV creatives ransacking existing IP – any dust-covered song or back catalogue or Wikipedia entry – in order to churn out something that stands a statistically better chance of turning a buck than an original story. Nobody could wholly blame failure-wary execs for plumping for output whose popularity is proven (Prince has sold more than a 100m records worldwide) – yet the prevailing trend for spinning old faves into new formats has something a little tiresome to it. In the last 10 days alone we’ve had news of a Great Gatsby prequel and of a Netflix series based on the work of Roald Dahl, “building out an imaginative story universe that expands far beyond the pages of the books”.
The comparison with Dahl is an apt one, since it’s the writer’s heirs rather than the man himself who inked the deal. Prince was famously proprietorial towards his music: he consistently removed his songs from YouTube, forbade Spotify from playing them and didn’t even grant fair use to Weird Al Yankovic. Now his estate – consisting of his six siblings – finds itself in possession of this goldmine, and they seem to be a lot less reticent, so to the many cash-spinning releases since his death, we can now add a jukebox musical.
It’s a genre that has traditionally had a rough time of it on screen. Mamma Mia! did the business at the box office but went down infamously badly with critics. (“The legal definition of torture has been much aired in recent years, and I take Mamma Mia! to be a useful contribution to that debate,” wrote the New Yorker’s Anthony Lane.) Other ventures include Julie Taymor’s Across the Universe, a flop based on the Beatles’ back catalogue, and Clint Eastwood’s Jersey Boys.
Much of these confections’ horror lies in the sort of necessarily baggy story that can accommodate a great number of wildly different songs. The Queen stage musical, We Will Rock You, centred on Galileo and Scaramouche, two rebels who take on a villain called the Killer Queen in a mission that involves them going to the Seven Seas of Rhye. What, then, to expect of a Prince musical?
Prince’s evocative and lascivious songs could tell any number of stories, but it’s probably fair to say the film won’t centre on Darling Nikki, the sex fiend whom the singer meets “masturbating with a magazine” in a hotel lobby. At best we might be granted a montage scene set to Gett Off, although 23 positions could be a lot to get through in four minutes. The point is that Prince’s music is daring, spiky and kinky, and it might be hard to tease out a coherent narrative from songs as different as Raspberry Beret and I Would Die 4 U. It’s also likely that the queer edges of Prince’s music might get blunted by this type of endeavour – although if the film features a take on When You Were Mine with a male-male-female threesome in it I will be the first to doff my cap.
Whether Prince’s musical brilliance – which is of a different ilk to that of Abba or the Beatles – can be preserved in this film is another question entirely. In the meantime, anybody worried for the state of cinema can draw some gallows humour from the thought of a team of frazzled writers sweating their way through Prince’s songbook to sift out potential storylines.
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