How The Greatest Showman rewrote the stars to become a monster success

They said it wouldn’t make it. They said it would never amount to anything. They said it was too loud, too weird, too lowbrow, too populist. They scoffed and scorned.

But the sharpest words couldn’t cut it down. Three months after its release, The Greatest Showman — a flashy movie musical starring Hugh Jackman as a sanitized version of P.T. Barnum — is one of the most successful box office hits of all time, a feat that seemed unthinkable after its dismal showing its first weekend in theaters.

Jackman and co. have sung and danced their ways into the hearts of moviegoers all over the world, and the payoff has been stunning. By some measures, The Greatest Showman’s success approaches that of a film like Titanic.

The movie is everywhere. Its big number, “This Is Me,” won a Golden Globe and was nominated for an Oscar; it was featured in both advertising for NBC’s Winter Olympics coverage and the figure skating exhibition gala, and it’s been covered by Kesha. There’s a Greatest Showman IMAX experience and Greatest Showman sing-alongs, Greatest Showman-themed SoulCycle rides and Greatest Showman sermons across America. You can be certain people will be crooning “Rewrite the Stars” at karaoke very soon.

But what is this movie? Where did it come from? By what measure is it popular? And what does its popularity indicate about critics, audiences, and the movie business?

The Greatest Showman is a movie musical loosely based on the life of circus impresario P.T. Barnum — a.k.a. the greatest showman. It’s a long-gestating passion project for Hugh Jackman, who spent almost a decade in between stints as Wolverine trying to get the film made. It was announced in 2009, with Jackman set to star; in 2011, Michael Gracey (with whom Jackman had shot a Lipton Iced Tea commercial) was announced as the director of the project.

For years, movie studios didn’t seem too convinced that they wanted to invest in a musical. It took a long time to get 20th Century Fox on board — but come on board they did, perhaps seeing the broad appeal of musicals like Hamilton and movie musicals like La La Land and Les Misérables, in which Jackman also starred. The film went into production in November 2016, with a cast that included Michelle Williams, Zac Efron, Zendaya, Rebecca Ferguson, and Broadway stalwart Keala Settle. It premiered a year later.

The Greatest Showman is a version of Barnum’s life story, scrubbed clean of the well-documented racist, exploitative bits. In this rendition of the story, Barnum is a dreamer and a visionary, a family man whose wealthy, high-class in-laws scoff at his lowbrow, vulgar aspirations to entertain the masses. Barnum rounds up a group of “freaks” and performers — a bearded lady, a strongman, a dwarf, trapeze artists — and convinces a playwright (Efron) to become his business partner, a move the playwright’s snobby family finds baffling. The circus is a wild success, though people in the town condemn it as a breeding ground for “abominations,” protesting and picketing.

Meanwhile, Barnum meets Jenny Lind (Ferguson), the famous Swedish soprano, and promises to make her a star in America by promoting a whirlwind tour all over the country. But as they travel, Barnum starts to drift from his moorings and must return to his roots to find true happiness.

The movie is driven by its music, written by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, the Oscar- and Tony-winning songwriting duo behind Dear Evan Hansen and La La Land. Most of the songs feel more like Top 40 pop than show tunes, and they’re infectious. The soundtrack, released two weeks before the film’s theatrical debut, spent multiple weeks in the No. 1 slot on the Billboard album charts.

Even beyond its music, though, The Greatest Showman’s appeal is obvious. It’s a PG-rated movie aimed at families, with a feel-good message of empowerment and a brightly colored, populist style that mirrors its subject matter. It coaxes viewers to just let go of their inhibitions and enjoy the ride — a plea underlined in the form of a snobby critic character, clearly meant to mirror anyone who starts thinking too hard about the movie while they’re watching it. He learns his lesson in the end, and so, The Greatest Showman suggests, should we.

A narrative has grown up around The Greatest Showman — maybe prompted by the movie’s critic storyline — that it was critically reviled but audiences loved it and made it a success, proving the critics wrong and, in a roundabout way, validating Barnum’s (and Jackman’s) whole enterprise.

This isn’t entirely right. Critics certainly did not embrace the movie en masse, but it scored a 48 rating on Metacritic and a 56 percent Rotten Tomatoes rating, which is only 4 points shy of being rated “fresh.” Those numbers indicate a lukewarm reception: Some critics liked the movie, some hated it, and a lot had mixed feelings about it. (One reason for this is Jackman’s performance, which is so buoyant and full of joy that it’s impossible not to smile.)

Audiences also didn’t rush right out to see it: The Greatest Showman opened on December 20, 2017, in a crowded field of movies that included The Last Jedi, which opened just days earlier. Its first-weekend box office haul was a dismal $8.8 million, far below the studio’s expectations. Numbers that low usually spell doom.

But the following weekend, that number almost doubled, and the movie took in $15 million. Since then, The Greatest Showman has made more than $165 million in the US (and more than $217 million abroad), buoyed by word of mouth and repeat visits from fans. That means the movie is a bona fide hit by some important measures.

One of those measures is a movie’s multiplier, calculated by dividing its total domestic box office returns by its first-weekend returns. This helps demonstrate the movie’s staying power with audiences past the first weekend and indicate strong word of mouth. (It also means that a movie’s multiplier always gets higher over its theatrical run.) Few films have multipliers that rise above single digits; the highest multiplier of all time belongs to Titanic, which opened to $21.6 million but finished its 10-month run in theaters with a multiplier of 21.

Because The Greatest Showman’s opening weekend numbers were so low, its multiplier is quite high — as of March 7, it was 18.8. It probably won’t surpass Titanic, but it’s going to come very close. And it currently has the second-highest multiplier for a movie with a wide opening of all time.

That means this is a leggy movie. Legginess is measured from week to week as the ratio between a movie’s total domestic box office and its largest weekend gross. Normally films perform strongly in their first and second weekend, and maybe a few weeks beyond, but start to drop off as audiences have seen the movie and it must compete with newer releases. But a leggy movie is one that runs against that pattern, continuing to find success long past the opening date, often because of word of mouth and repeat attendance. Some of the leggiest films of all time include Raiders of the Lost Ark, ET: The Extra-Terrestrial, The Exorcist, and My Big Fat Greek Wedding.

As of March 7, The Greatest Showman’s measure of legginess had dropped as the film’s box office haul from weekend to weekend slowly fell — but it’s still considered a remarkably leggy film.

For a movie that was presumed to be a dud after its first weekend, these are impressive numbers, especially since it’s been a while since any film was quite this leggy (the last comparable example was Zootopia in March 2016). This endurance has helped push the film’s box office numbers beyond those of several similar films, such as 2014’s Into the Woods (which grossed $128,002,372) and 2012’s Les Misérables (which grossed $148,809,770). As of March 7, The Greatest Showman had made $165,456,962 in the US.

Uniting these two questions is a bigger, more complicated one: Why exactly has The Greatest Showman done so well despite a critical consensus that only barely qualifies as “lukewarm”?

The New York Times asked its readers to explain why they loved the film, and some of the answers were revealing, noting that the movie offered a positive message of empowerment and an escape from the real world. People love the music and the stars — especially Jackman, Efron, and Zendaya — and many mentioned repeat viewings.

“I’m a 44-year-old male high school English teacher, and I have seen The Greatest Showman eight times with my wife,” a reader named Chris Bryant wrote. “First, it’s about a circus — and circuses have always offered the masses a much-needed break from reality. There is also a happy ending for everyone. Yes, it’s hokey, but you leave the theater with a light heart and a smile on your face.”

Excising the darker material from Barnum’s life helped make it a hit too. “There is something undeniably lovable about The Greatest Showman, even though (or perhaps because) its historical perspective has been so radically simplified,” David Sims wrote in the Atlantic. There’s little in The Greatest Showman that’s complex or disturbing. It’s a classic rags-to-riches story mixed with some spectacle and a message of self-love, with the bonus that uppity elite types are the bad guys. You can hardly blame audiences in 2018 for wanting an infectious movie about good guys celebrating difference and creativity.

But that doesn’t mean critics were “wrong,” unless you think the function of criticism is roughly parallel to the function of meteorology. Critics aren’t in the business of predicting what will appeal to an audience. Most critics are interested in evaluating films and thinking about what they mean for the broader culture, and while everyone doesn’t get it right all the time, that means that the opinions of critics and audiences often diverge. No critic considers that a failure. It’s to be expected.

Some critics (like me) took issue with the movie’s surface-level tribute to diversity that’s only skin-deep. Some also found troubling the way the film encourages us to accept illusion and falsehood unquestioningly — to brush the film’s more troubling aspects under the rug and not question them because it’s “just entertainment.”

And yet nobody was under any illusion that this would be the majority audience opinion. In fact, that’s just what some critics found disturbing: that it was the sort of film that packaged its faults so slickly and buried in so much glitz that you’re a joyless party pooper if you try to speak up about it. There’s a lot to enjoy and even some to praise about The Greatest Showman, and it’s no wonder that it’s been so broadly appealing. But many critics felt uneasy about how it goes about engendering that broad appeal.

To critics, there’s no such thing as “just entertainment.” Entertainment matters because it’s a window into what matters to us as a culture, and it shapes the way we think about ourselves. That a movie like The Greatest Showman is a massive hit doesn’t contradict critics’ suspicions about how the film works on its audiences — in fact, it confirms it.

But what matters in the industry isn’t critical opinion — it’s money. And while the success of The Greatest Showman may be difficult to repeat, you can be sure Hollywood will try. More movie musicals will follow; whether they can capture the magic that so strongly appeals to fans of The Greatest Showman remains to be seen.