Hugh Jackman may be a great Wolverine, but in his heart, he’s a song and dance man. That’s led to a few attempts on his part to bring back the movie musical, most notably a splashy take on Les Miserables. And now that he’s done with superheroics, it looks like he’s taking another shot at bringing back the musical with The Greatest Showman.
Based on the life of P.T. Barnum, The Greatest Showman looks mostly focused on the founding of Barnum’s notorious museum and the traveling show that would become the Barnum & Bailey Circus, which just shut down this year. And in something Barnum would probably find hilarious, the movie’s pretty clearly a crock from a biographical perspective just based on the trailer, since Barnum never worked as a clerk. But we guess a clerk striking out on his own with a museum makes a better movie than a guy making his fortune on the lottery and getting thrown in jail for newspaper editorials.
The main question is whether audiences will turn up on Christmas Day for an original musical about the guy who founded the world’s most famous circus. Original musicals are extremely rare in Hollywood, at this point, so it’ll be curious to see how this does. We’ll find out in December.
