10 Best Movies Based On Broadway Musicals, Ranked

The movie musical has morphed drastically over a century. When the musical genre first came to prominence in the sound era of Hollywood, it was a space for revues with little care or thought as to a storyline connecting musical numbers. Eventually, just as the stage musical changed with “Oklahoma!” and “South Pacific,” Hollywood morphed in the same way. But it wasn’t just that films such as “An American in Paris” or “The Band Wagon” told full stories with song-and-dance numbers; Hollywood went straight to the source to take stage musicals and adapt them into features. Although we’re not in a Golden Age of movie musicals the way that things were in the 1960s, there are plenty of big-budget musical adaptations that burst onto the scene, as well as more low-key affairs meant to match their source material, everything from the mid-2000s adaptation of “Dreamgirls” to “Dear Evan Hansen.”

But just because there are loads of options from which to choose, doesn’t mean they’re created equal. What are the ten best stage-to-screen musical adaptations? (Keeping in mind that any choices must have originated on the stage, and that strictly filmed versions of stage productions don’t qualify. Sorry to “Hamilton.”) 

Let’s run down the ranking right now.

There’s something of a cascading effect when you think of movie musicals based on stage musicals, because it’s rare for stage shows to not be based on something themselves. In the case of the excellent “Dreamgirls,” it’s not just that the 2006 film was based on the stage show of the same name from the 1970s. That same show, about an up-and-coming group of young Black women whose rise to fame in the world of music is countermatched by the fall of its most powerful singer, was heavily inspired not just by Detroit’s Motown music, but was purported to be based on how the inimitable Diana Ross and the Supremes had initially included another singer who was removed unceremoniously from the group. When “Dreamgirls” opened in 2006, it had the aura of a future Oscar winner thanks to being from director Bill Condon, who was fresh off co-writing the script for the Best Picture winner of 2002, “Chicago.” Plus, it featured Beyonce Knowles, Jamie Foxx, Eddie Murphy, and recent “American Idol” contestant Jennifer Hudson as Effie White, the singer who’s kicked to the curb by the cutthroat music producer who values fame and power over humanity.

Nearly twenty years later, it’s arguably true that Hudson won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her powerhouse performance of “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going,” as that specific performance (as well as her other singing in the film) is more notable than her acting. But Condon deftly brings a lot of show-stopping musical numbers to life with verve and intelligence, and the second-act emotional theatrics are effectively compelling and tear-jerking. This isn’t just one of the great movie musicals, but it’s one of the more underrated entries in the genre that you should check out if you never saw it in theaters.

For the 1964 film version of “My Fair Lady,” the starting point was George Bernard Shaw’s “Pygmalion,” a comic play in which a pompous phonetics professor falls in love with a lower-class flower girl named Eliza Doolittle while attempting to win a bet in which he turns her fortunes around to fit right in with the upper-crust of London society. “My Fair Lady” follows the same general story arc, and is buoyed as much by the list of stone-cold classic songs written by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe, as by the combination of the legendary Audrey Hepburn as Eliza and Rex Harrison reprising his role as Dr. Henry Higgins. Like the show itself, some of “My Fair Lady” is broad and pitched to the rafters as if the actors were performing for the back row of an imagined stage. (If you have seen the film enough times, you can almost hear Hepburn’s delivery of “Gaaarn” right now.) 

But it helps, even with the fact that Hepburn’s singing was handled by Marni Nixon, that the songs in the film are just among the best ever written for any medium, from “I Could Have Danced All Night” to “On The Street Where You Live” to “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly.” It’s not that it would be impossible to screw up such wonderful music, but it’d be awfully difficult, and the great George Cukor directing means that the film moves along swiftly, effectively, and often gorgeously. The most effective criticism you can make against the film is arguably one that the entire source material should bear: that it’s just a wee bit sexist to have a man controlling so much of a woman’s life for the purposes of a silly bet (or at all), but the actors, the sets and costumes, the humor, and the music all supersede that criticism in the final result.

It’s one of the oldest stories ever told, dating back to William Shakespeare’s iconic “Romeo and Juliet,” about a pair of ill-fated lovers whose warring families all but guarantee their personal doom. What makes the original film version of “West Side Story” stand out so much is less the clever retelling of such a classic tale, and more how co-directors Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins bring the exuberant energy of the stage show to life on the big screen. The directing pair also wisely shoot much of the film on location, allowing for the gang fights told via dance to feel even more lively and real. Here is a film where the sets are the real world, and often feel like they’re butting up against the gradual gentrification of the West Side of New York City. 

As is the case with the Steven Spielberg remake (about which more soon), the performances by our key lovers (Tony and Maria) are less captivating than that of the side players, such as George Chakiris or Rita Moreno, the latter of whom won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar, no doubt because of the vivacious way in which she brought “America” to life. What really makes “West Side Story” stand out, though, is the presentation of the big musical numbers, from the fluidity of the dance sequences to the use of real settings to allow the audience to feel like they were living and breathing the New York lifestyle of the early 1960s, even if they’d never visited the Big Apple. 

One of the funnier details about the making of “My Fair Lady” is that studio chief Jack Warner didn’t want the actress who originated Eliza Doolittle on stage to play her in the film, because she wasn’t a star. The actress? Julie Andrews, who would win a Best Actress Oscar the same year for her title role in “Mary Poppins.” The following year, she was big enough to replace the original star of “The Sound of Music” in the film version, directed by Robert Wise. Based on a true story, the film follows Andrews as the impetuous nun Maria as she’s tasked with serving as the newest governess of the Von Trapp household, amid the rise of Nazism in Austria and as she begins to fall in love with the man of the house, Captain Von Trapp (Christopher Plummer, who claimed to hate the film). “The Sound of Music” is the apotheosis of the old-fashioned stage musical; unlike Wise’s previous directing entry, “West Side Story,” this is not a film about the fluid movement of a dancer’s body, but a more traditional blend of song-driven musical sequences and dialogue scenes.

So you might say that this is lesser by the right of not being as daring or unique in its presentation. But the difference is simple: the songs by Rodgers and Hammerstein are just straight-up classics, banger after banger. There’s the title song, which opens the film, to “How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?” to “Climb Ev’ry Mountain” to “Edelweiss,” and on and on and on. And the combination of Andrews and Plummer makes for a sly pairing, enough so that it counterbalances the inherent sweetness and sentimentality of the source material. It’s easy to watch this film and become allergic to stage musicals, but if you give yourself over to it, it’s one of the most enjoyable musical experiences ever captured on film.

The concept of a cult classic did exist before the 1975 film adaptation of “The Rocky Horror Picture Show,” but never before has a film so embodied the cult spirit as this one. As much a riff on classical horror as it is a pansexual celebration of the wild and inexplicable, “Rocky Horror” is arguably the kind of film best enjoyed with friends, at least a theater-full of them. The film turns 50 in 2025, and the fact that it’s survived a half-century and avoided the fate of so many forgotten musicals despite mixed reviews at the time and initially unimpressive box office is kind of remarkable. It speaks to the twisted charm of the film, embodied by Tim Curry as the androgynous and alluring Dr. Frank N. Furter, who has some nasty and erotic designs on a hapless young couple (Barry Bostwick and Susan Sarandon) as well as some other creations in his lab.

“The Rocky Horror Picture Show” is not a film known for its grandeur as a cinematic experiment; unlike a lot of the titles on this list, this is a low-budget film, and it’s proud of it. Again, these days, the movie is as well known for how its worldwide audiences embrace it through midnight-movie showings, but even when rewatching it, you cannot deny its goofy blend of dark comedy, sexual mania, and horrifying allusions. The handmade quality of the film is what makes it endure, even beyond recent TV remakes that are best left forgotten.

The story of Professor Harold Hill, as played by Robert Preston, has only felt more resonant over time. It’s the story of a smiling con artist whose gag is that he visits random small towns in the Midwest, convinces them that they have trouble (often emanating from the most innocuous of sources, like the introduction of a pool table in town) and that they can only solve that trouble by paying him to start up a boys’ marching band in town … before he leaves without providing any musical instruments or instruction. Yes, the idea of con artists putting one over on know-nothing Americans may feel less than entertaining these days, but the way in which Preston embodies Professor Hill, smiling without being sarcastic or too smug, and believably besotted with the intelligent Marian Paroo (Shirley Jones), makes up for a lot of the potential flaws in the story.

“The Music Man” is one of the late-stage splashy musicals of the 1960s, the kind of film that they just don’t make anymore because it’s comfortable taking its time making you fall for the Iowa locale of River City just as Professor Hill ends up falling for the town as well as Marian herself. These days, it’s also fun to watch the movie and see it as a proving ground for the character of Winthrop, the lisping younger brother of Marion played by Ron Howard (around the same time he was playing Opie on “The Andy Griffith Show”). “The Music Man” is unquestionably old-fashioned, but in the most charming possible ways.

Before there were film adaptations of “Oklahoma!” or “South Pacific,” there was “On the Town.” This 1949 musical brought together a slew of heavy hitters behind and in front of the camera, such as Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra as two of three sailors on a brief shore leave in “New York, New York,” hoping to sow their wild oats before heading back onto a ship; songwriters Betty Comden and Adolph Green (who would later write the script to “Singin’ in the Rain”); and co-director Stanley Donen, in his debut. (He and Kelly served as co-directors.) Although “On the Town” is perhaps not the most beloved stage musicals these days, its splashy and colorful depiction of a post-war America coupled with the absolutely dynamite group of performers is enough to buoy even the lowest spirits.

“On the Town” is also that rare Broadway adaptation that doesn’t dawdle; even with a hoofer like Kelly and the expectation that dancing gets as much showtime here as singing, the film’s runtime is a tight 98 minutes, making for a film as fleet as the adventure it’s depicting. Perhaps most importantly of all, the fact it brought together so many of the key players of Kelly’s finest film, the aforementioned “Singin’,” means that it’s absolutely worth your time especially if it’s slipped off your radar.

Some musicals come from the strangest of places, and “Little Shop of Horrors” is perhaps Patient Zero of this idea. The off-Broadway show that led to this 1986 cult classic directed by Frank Oz first started as a black-and-white low-budget horror film co-starring a very young Jack Nicholson and directed by Roger Corman. But as ridiculous as it may sound for the story of a killer plant and the nebbish who feeds it more and more bodies to stay strong to become a musical standby, that’s exactly what happened. It helps that the film’s songs are written by a pre-Disney Alan Menken and Howard Ashman. (If you want to be a true Ashman/Menken hipster, you can say that you liked “Part of Your World” better when it was a song from this film, “Somewhere That’s Green.” But don’t do that.) 

Although “Little Shop of Horrors” has become well-known for its two endings — the original is a lot darker and closer to what’s on stage — it’s one of the most cleverly designed and hilarious movie musicals ever made. Part of the humor is straight from the show itself, like an exuberant show-stopper sung by Steve Martin about being a pain-loving dentist; part of it comes from fanciful touches and cameos, like one from Bill Murray that amounts to the only time he and Martin have ever shared the big screen together. But Ellen Greene and Rick Moranis are the beating heart of the film, shining through the impressive set design, the dark comedy, and the splashes of blood throughout.

It would be nice if “Cabaret” felt more antiquated than it actually is. But the film, based on the searing Broadway musical of the same name that has been effectively revived twice in the States in the intervening five decades, has lost none of its acrid power since its release in 1972. The legendary choreographer Bob Fosse directed the story of pre-World War II Germany, as composing team John Kander and Fred Ebb utilize a series of bar-room songs as a backdrop for commentary about the Weimar era curdled into a place wherein Adolf Hitler could take over not only the country but most of Europe as he and his fellow Nazis enacted the Holocaust and led to another world war. Although some musicals embrace complexity, few are quite as directly, deliberately discomfiting as “Cabaret.”

Liza Minnelli stars as Sally Bowles, a talented chanteuse who tries to balance her love affair with an idealistic young man with her fervent (if fruitless) attempts to ignore the horrors of life going on right outside her door. Though Minnelli is unsurprisingly excellent as Sally, it was Joel Grey who all but leapt off the screen in recreating his stage role as the androgynous Master of Ceremonies at the Kit Kat Club, from his exuberant opening number “Wilkommen” to the dark commentary on Judaism in “If You Could See Her.” Fosse stages these numbers with a blend of frenetic energy and sharp lighting, to heighten how uncomfortable the juxtaposition of rousing songs against the rise of the Nazis truly was. For a long time, some film fans have bristled at how this film netted a few Oscars (like Best Director) that could’ve gone to “The Godfather,” but honestly, time has been unfortunately very kind to this disturbing, prescient musical.

No one does it better than Steven Spielberg. The challenges in making a remake of “West Side Story” were immense, no matter who directed. First, you’re taking on a musical that just about everyone knows, even if they haven’t seen it in full on stage or the screen. Second, the film version is widely cherished by scholars and audiences alike. Third, a new version of this specific story (and its riff on Shakespeare’s most classic tragedy in the 1960s of New York) could seem stale, compared to all the other musicals Spielberg could have directed. And yet, in spite of those challenges as well as another one related to casting, this version of “West Side Story” is proof that few filmmakers have ever lived who can infuse the most familiar story with cleverness, aching heart, and energy to match the young cast on camera. 

The aforementioned challenge is one that’s partly inherent to the story of Tony and Maria, star-crossed lovers doomed to a tragic fate because of the warring gangs they each represent: Tony is a bit of an emotional cipher, and that doesn’t change with Ansel Elgort as the lead (even if you ignore the accusations levied at him during the film’s production). Rachel Zegler, however, makes for a winning Maria, and Ariana DeBose and Mike Faist are both incredible, lively, and charismatic as the main characters’ closest allies. And Spielberg remains tops in terms of mounting phenomenal setpieces; he treats each number, accurately, as a big show-stopper meant to make you almost burst into spontaneous applause. Someone else may have delivered a less enjoyable film, but Steven Spielberg topped some of the greatest musical minds ever with this remake.