Elvis Movie Is The Apocalypse Now Of Musicals, Says Baz Luhrmann

Baz Luhrmann's upcoming Elvis biopic aims to take the musical genre to new heights, with Luhrmann claiming it's the Apocalypse Now of the genre.

Elvis Movie Is The Apocalypse Now Of Musicals, Says Baz Luhrmann

Filmmaker Baz Luhrmann says that his upcoming Elvis biopic is the Apocalypse Now of musicals. It’s been almost a decade since Luhrmann delivered a new feature film, with his last release having been a 3D adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic American novel, The Great Gatsby, in 2013. The film won two Oscars and proved once again that Luhrmann’s ability to take familiar subject matter and completely reinvent it was still his strongest asset.

However, after the success of Gatsby, Luhrmann decided to turn his sights toward the rapidly growing streaming TV market. Netflix commissioned him to bring his unique appreciation of the musical genre to audiences with The Get Down, a TV series that focused on teenagers in the South Bronx during New York City’s cultural heyday of the 1970s. Unfortunately for Luhrmann, the experiment proved a failure and Netflix parted ways with the series in 2017 after just one season. In the years since the demise of The Get Down, Luhrmann has been hard at work on what some might consider the biopic topic of all biopic topics: rock n’ roll legend Elvis Presley. Luhrmann’s Elvis will hit theatres in just over a month, with up-and-coming actor Austin Butler in the film’s titular role.

Anticipation remains high for Elvis, with Luhrmann’s reputation for flamboyant visuals and busy frames once again expected. But while fans are set to head to theatres as soon as possible, Luhrmann maintains that the film isn’t a biopic and that instead, it’s “a three-act cultural opera.” In fact, during a recent interview with EW, the 59-year-old filmmaker went even further, comparing Elvis to Francis Ford Coppola’s epic 1979 hit Apocalypse Now by stating that it was “the Apocalypse Now of musicals”:

The Apocalypse Now of musicals is what I’ve joked about calling the movie — and that’s the ’70s period. It’s so sprawling and it’s beautiful, but it’s powerful. It’s a three-act pop-cultural opera.

Even by Luhrmann’s standards, it’s a bold statement. Apocalypse Now is arguably more famous for the extremely difficult lengths that Coppola went to just to get the film made than the actual film is with audiences. On top of all that, the film’s brutal tale of the horrors of war sets it worlds apart from Luhrmann’s Elvis. Nonetheless, Luhrmann’s tongue-in-cheek comparison does make a certain degree of sense, in that he’s attempting to do something with the musical genre that audiences really haven’t seen before. That level of ambition is pure Luhrmann, and while he seems to be expecting tremendous things from Elvis, like most of his films, it already feels as if it will either be a tremendous hit or a substantial miss.

Most likely the biggest challenge that Elvis faces, however, isn’t revolutionizing the musical. Instead, it’s attracting audiences who didn’t grow up listening to Elvis and really don’t know much about him at all. It could be argued that Luhrmann didn’t make the film for this demographic and instead is appealing to Elvis fans. But times change, as does music, and today Elvis’ popularity might not be enough to make the film a hit. Then again, this is the same filmmaker who made Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet into a blockbuster, meaning that anything is possible when it comes to Luhrmann’s chances.