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Jeremy Urquhart
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Jeremy has more than 2100 published articles on Collider to his name, and has been writing for the site since February 2022. He's an omnivore when it comes to his movie-watching diet, so will gladly watch and write about almost anything, from old Godzilla films to gangster flicks to samurai movies to classic musicals to the French New Wave to the MCU... well, maybe not the Disney+ shows.
His favorite directors include Martin Scorsese, Sergio Leone, Akira Kurosawa, Quentin Tarantino, Werner Herzog, John Woo, Bob Fosse, Fritz Lang, Guillermo del Toro, and Yoji Yamada. He's also very proud of the fact that he's seen every single Nicolas Cage movie released before 2022, even though doing so often felt like a tremendous waste of time. He's plagued by the question of whether or not The Room is genuinely terrible or some kind of accidental masterpiece, and has been for more than 12 years (and a similar number of viewings).
When he's not writing lists - and the occasional feature article - for Collider, he also likes to upload film reviews to his Letterboxd profile (username: Jeremy Urquhart) and Instagram account.
He is also currently in the process of trying to become a Stephen King expert by reading all 2397 novels written by the author.
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Honestly, it was surprisingly hard to find examples of stage musicals that haven’t been turned into movies yet, especially if you try finding ones that debuted more than a couple of decades ago. For a while, Wicked was probably the biggest musical you could only see on the stage, with that being the case from 2003 until 2024, which is when the first half of a film adaptation came out, and then Wicked: For Good followed in 2025.
Maybe it’s still better as a stage show, or maybe not, but also, that doesn’t matter here. What’s of concern right now is a rundown of some stage musicals that haven’t yet become movies, but that’s likely to change in the years ahead, at least for some of these. Hell, if they “made” a “movie” out of Cats in 2019, then they can “make” a “movie” out of pretty much anything. Also, if there are filmed performances on stage, that doesn’t count as a film adaptation. There’s a certain very famous musical that debuted in 2015 and had a popular filmed version released in 2020, but if it hasn’t been properly captured as a cinematic feature film, it counts as one of those rare yet-to-be-adapted works.
7 'Avenue Q' (2003)
Image via Vineyard Theatre
After The Happytime Murders (2018), the idea of finding humor in puppets doing very unsavory things might be unappealing. Like, unappealing not in the way seeing puppets doing adult things is supposed to be unappealing, but unappealing because it was done in a really unfunny way in The Happytime Murders. But the 2000s were a better time for that kind of crude and subversive comedy, it seems, as demonstrated by the extremely underrated Wonder Showzen, which parodies children’s TV shows, and really exemplified by Avenue Q, which is intended to play out like a parody of Sesame Street.
It's not just crude for the sake of being crude, either, since Avenue Q has been praised for being genuinely clever as a piece of satire and something willing to explore various adult topics. It’s not the kind of thing that would be for everyone, sure, and box office-wise, it likely wouldn’t do Wicked numbers or anything, but it could be technically impressive and reliably funny on screen as it is on the stage, if handled correctly. There is potential, but for whatever reason (The Happytime Murders-related or otherwise), it’s not been done yet, at least at the time of writing.
6 'Follies' (1971)
Artwork by David Edward Byrd
There have been plenty of Stephen Sondheim musicals that have been turned into movies, including as far back as 1961, with the Best Picture-winning West Side Story. Some of his works that are more uniquely designed for the stage than the screen have nonetheless gotten film adaptations, too, including (for better or worse) Into the Woods in 2014. But Follies, which is about a Broadway theater that’s about to be demolished, and a reunion of people who used to perform there, has remained on stage.
Maybe that’s fitting, considering it’s all about the stage, but there have been rumblings about turning Follies into a movie, including by the director (Rob Marshall) and star (Meryl Streep) of the film version of Into the Woods. Follies would still probably work well enough as a film, though it could be a bit more downbeat, as a musical movie, than some might be looking for, but showbiz is ruthless and sad sometimes and that’s that, you know?
5 'The Book of Mormon' (2011)
You don’t have to have seen The Book of Mormon to know that Trey Parker and Matt Stone know how to write a surprisingly good musical, since South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut is a genuinely great one. With The Book of Mormon, though, their co-writer, Robert Lopez, shouldn’t be overlooked, since he’s also demonstrated he knows his stuff as one of the writers of the aforementioned Avenue Q. But mentioning South Park and Avenue Q is a good way to get an understanding of the kind of humor you're in for with this particular musical.
It's a massive one, to put it mildly, because even if you don’t watch a lot of stage musicals, you will have heard of The Book of Mormon, and you might well have even seen it. It’s satirical and tackles some heavy topics, but all in a very engaging and undeniably funny way, all the while also having the kind of great music you'd expect from this particular team of writers. It could well still be big enough as a stage musical to make the development of a movie adaptation feel like anything but a priority, so there’s a good chance that one day, there will be a movie version of The Book of Mormon. It would surely make sense to do one, eventually.
4 'Spamalot' (2004)
This is a bit of a sneaky example, since Spamalot is an adaptation of a movie (1975’s Monty Python and the Holy Grail), but there’s a lot added here by way of musical numbers to make it its own distinct work. It’s got a different title, too, so it’s a bit different from The Lion King originally being a 1994 movie and then getting a stage production made of it that debuted in 1997. It’s a more impressive re-imagining than the 2019 photo-realistic CGI remake, at least.
But back to Spamalot, this one is also worth mentioning because there have been attempts to make a film out of it, so that makes it feel like a bit less of a stretch to include. The idea of Spamalot being a movie isn't out of the realm of possibility… or it wasn’t out of the realm of possibility until 2023, apparently. Spamalot has been killed as a film project (Eric Idle’s words), but hey, like Paris in Casablanca, we’ll always have Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
3 'Hamilton' (2015)
As alluded to before, there was a stage musical that has a movie of sorts already that’s still worth mentioning here, and Hamilton is that example. It was a filmed version of the stage show, though, that originally dropped on Disney+ during the height of COVID-19, when movies weren’t really coming out in cinemas that much. The 2020 filmed version of Hamilton did get a theatrical release five years later, and it did surprisingly well at the box office, considering it’s not only easy to stream at home, but has been easy to stream at home for half a decade (time flies, huh?), meaning any fans of Hamilton have probably watched it a bunch of times already.
The re-release shows there’s still a good deal of passion for the musical, though, and it might be another The Book of Mormon sort of situation where there’s so much momentum behind the stage show and the productions of it around the world that they're holding off on making it a movie for a while. It’s less a matter of “if” Hamilton will become a conventionally shot – and theatrically released – feature film, and more a matter of “when” that'll happen.
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Hamilton
PG-13
History
Drama
Musical
Release Date
July 3, 2020
Runtime
160 minutes
Director
Thomas Kail
Writers
Lin-Manuel Miranda
Cast
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Lin-Manuel Miranda
Alexander Hamilton
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Leslie Odom Jr.
Aaron Burr
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2 'Ragtime' (1996)
Image via Livent Inc.
Ragtime was a novel written by E.L. Doctorow in 1975, and it received a movie adaptation in 1981, which was directed by Miloš Forman between him directing the Best Picture-winning films One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) and Amadeus (1984). Ragtime, the 1996 musical, was another adaptation of the novel, but not an adaptation of the movie, since that movie wasn’t a musical, and more of a period drama.
So, the musical version of Ragtime does remain un-adapted for the big screen, but it’s another that could work, and one that does show up a few times if you Google stage musicals that haven’t become movies. It’s got some well-known songs, it’s an interesting blend of fact and fiction, and it’s an overall engaging and interesting portrait of life in America during the early 20th century, and the differences in lifestyles between people of different races and social classes. If done poorly, Ragtime could still prove successful as Oscar bait, and if done properly, it could honestly work very well as a movie, so maybe it'll happen one day.
1 'Assassins' (1990)
Oh hey, it’s Stephen Sondheim again, with Assassins. This one’s a bit divisive, and apparently controversial upon release, but of course it would be, since it’s a musical about a group of people who, throughout U.S. history, attempted to assassinate – or succeeded in assassinating – various U.S. Presidents. Like, the characters here are John Wilkes Booth (Abraham Lincoln’s assassin), Lee Harvey Oswald (John F. Kennedy’s assassin), and the still-alive (at the time of writing) John Hinckley Jr., who attempted to assassinate Ronald Reagan.
Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street was adapted effectively into a movie musical in 2007, and that one’s also exceptionally dark and morbid, so maybe in the right hands, Assassins could work.
Beyond that somewhat alarming premise, Assassins is also more about exploring ideas and themes than it is telling a traditional narrative, which could make it difficult to translate into a film… but still, they tried to do that with Cats, and that one’s pretty damn plotless while working best as a stage show. Also, Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street was adapted effectively into a movie musical in 2007, and that one’s also exceptionally dark and morbid, so maybe in the right hands, Assassins could work. It would be interesting to see attempted, at the very least.
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