The 5 Best Movie Musicals of the 2000s

Is it a musical movie or a movie musical?

For the benefit of the list, we don’t mind whether the stage show was the chicken or the egg, instead, we’re just looking at great films from the 2000s with great musical numbers.

With so many on the way, including Kiss of the Spider Woman and Wicked: For Good, the list could change at any moment!

Chicago
One of the few musical films on this list to have won Best Picture at the Academy Awards, the 2002 flick starred Renée Zellweger, Catherine Zeta-Jones, and Richard Gere. The villainous vaudevillian dark comedy features songs by the wonderful John Kander and Fred Ebb, and is a go-to for theater fans.

Mamma Mia!
How could we resist it!? The show returns to Broadway this year.

Tick, Tick…Boom!
Lin-Manuel Miranda made his directorial film debut with the semi-autobiographical piece by the late, great Jonathan Larson. Andrew Garfield plays Larson in the Netflix flick, alongside a wealth of familiar faces and voices (including that of Sondheim). It’s a treasure trove of theatrical goodies, revealing new Easter eggs with every rewatch.

West Side Story
There was much love for both the original 1961 film and the one released sixty years later in 2021. Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim, and Arthur Laurents’s take on a New York City Romeo and Juliet is a classic. The Steven Spielberg-directed remake, with a screenplay by Tony Kushner, made a star out of Rachel Zegler. She made her Broadway debut in a revival of the Shakespeare play and is currently taking the West End by storm in Evita.

Wicked
Director Jon M Chu controversially split the title into two films: one for each act. The first introduced Cynthia Erivo as Elphaba and Ariana Grande as Glinda, leading an all-star cast that includes Jonathan Bailey, Jeff Goldblum, Michelle Yeoh. Performances and press tour aside, talk has surrounded the new orchestrations of much-loved songs, and how visually breathtaking the movie is, particularly in regards to costumes, where Paul Tazewell made history as the first Black man to win the Best Costume Design Oscar. Part 2 hits cinemas this Thanksgiving.