The musical as an institution has been a highly transformative and beloved medium of entertainment long before film was even created. Indeed, musicals have made for an exceptional turn in the realm of film; some of the most beloved and iconic films of all time are musicals, from all-time classics like Singing in the Rain and Grease to modern smash hits like La La Land and Hairspray.

However, for every masterfully crafted and widely beloved musical to grace the silver screen, there are a number of movie musicals that completely squander any opportunities for quality. From abstract stage musicals that can’t make the jump to the big screen to original projects that crumble in their own spectacular ways, there is no limit to the methods of how a musical can become a critical disaster. Especially for a genre that has seen numerous momentous highs and lows throughout the entirety of film history, the absolute worst movie musicals can easily be considered some of the worst movies of all time.

10 ‘Xanadu’ (1980)

Director: Robert Greenwald

One of the wildest and most iconic examples of pure chaos in filmmaking, Xanadu cemented a powerful legacy as one of the great so-bad-it’s-good movies with its over-the-top visuals and even stranger musical numbers. The film follows Kira, played by Olivia Newton-John, a beautiful young woman who inspires an artist and his friend to transform their run-down auditorium into a wild and high-flying rollerskating club.

Few films over the years, let alone musicals, have reached the levels of absurdity that Xanadu provides, yet at the same time, this insanity is the only thing the film has going for it. Outside the quirky, neon-lit visual style, Xanadu is incredibly bare-bones and lacking in nearly every other way, from underwhelming music to an even more underwhelming story and characters. While the film certainly has its positives—largely the late Newton-John in the lead role—and legacy as a so-bad-it’s-good classic, it’s a movie musical experience that has easily earned its place among the worst the genre has to offer.

9 ‘A Chorus Line’ (1985)

Director: Richard Attenborough

Adapted from the classic 1975 stage production, A Chorus Line follows the story of Broadway director Zach (Michael Douglas), who is tasked with finding a group of dancers for his new musical production. After a long and grueling process, he settles on a group of seventeen dancers with high hopes and even higher spirits. Making things more complicated is the presence of Cassie, a woman who previously had a romantic relationship with Zach but is willing to put their painful past to the side in the name of her career and the show as a whole.

A Chorus Line was considered a massive smash hit on stage, filled with standout musical sequences and a powerful story that took musical fans behind the scenes. On the contrary, the film failed to recapture and adapt the original’s magic. The music doesn’t hit as hard, the performances aren’t as high-flying and energetic, and the usually reliable Michael Douglas doesn’t even sing during the movie. Without the charm of the original, what remains is a slog of an experience that underwhelmed theater kids and alienated everyone else.

Watch on Amazon

8 ‘Eight Crazy Nights’ (2002)

Director: Seth Kearsley

Attempting to act as a more adult, raunchy take on the classic animated holiday musical formula, Eight Crazy Nights is one of Adam Sandler‘s worst comedic outings, as well as one of the worst holiday films of all time. The film sees Sandler voicing Davey Stone, a slacker who spends his time partying hard and terrorizing his small-town community as the holiday season finds a way to bring out the worst in him. After a stunt gets him in trouble with the law, he is forced to stay with the elderly Whitey as a method of workaround rehabilitation.

While a holiday musical filled with Sander’s music would appear to be a smash hit, considering his exceptional comedic music on Saturday Night Live, Eight Crazy Nights is everything but charming. Nearly every character is as unlikable as possible, as the film’s entire tone and humor is grotesque and over-the-top raunch that grows tired long before the credits roll. Even with some half-decent 2D animation on display, it isn’t enough to save a musical that is nearly rotten to its very core.

Watch on Hulu

7 ‘The Broadway Melody’ (1929)

Director: Harry Beaumont

Widely considered the worst Best Picture winner of all time, The Broadway Melody follows the story of vaudeville sisters Harriet and Queenie Mahoney on their journey to Broadway. The duo has high hopes of living in the limelight and becoming superstars, but they encounter a number of unexpected difficulties when they begin to fight over the affection of a mutual new friend, Eddie Kerns.

While the film was clearly of high enough quality in its era to earn a Best Picture win, the legacy and continued history of the genre has left The Broadway Melody in the dust. While many other classic films can be greatly attributed to having powerful and influential legacies that have stood the test of time, The Broadway Melody has only gotten worse with time. The forgettable songs, problematic plot points, and boring characters cement it as nothing but a relic of a bygone era.

The Broadway Melody

Release Date

June 6, 1929

Cast

Charles King , Anita Page , Bessie Love , Eddie Kane

Runtime

100 minutes

Writers

Edmund Goulding , Norman Houston , James Gleason , Earl Baldwin

Rent on Amazon

6 ‘The Apple’ (1980)

Director: Menahem Golan

Taking place in the then-future year of 1994, The Apple follows a strange, futuristic world where all societies around the world revolve around the power of music. It specifically centers on the stories of young singers Bibi Phillips and Alphie, who sign with the vicious music label Boogalow International Music to take part in the Worldvision Song Festival. As they soon realize the dangerous darker side of the music industry, their lives are forever changed, eventually fighting to escape the iron grip of the company.

The Apple is a high-concept and extravagant film that is lacking in anything but ambition, tackling biblical allegories and themes of corruption, conformity, and rebellion. In a different world, the film certainly could have worked, but it attempts to tackle so many things in such a short 90-minute runtime, combined with its wild and over-the-top execution, that it makes the entire experience nothing but a painful fever dream. The worst part is that even with all the promise and potential, the songs are so poorly made and forgettable that they squander all the potential and effort.

Watch on Tubi

5 ‘Dear Evan Hansen’ (2021)

Director: Stephen Chbosky

Already a relatively controversial yet highly successful and award-winning stage musical, Dear Evan Hansen attained mass infamy when it made the jump to the big screen. The film follows the story of Evan Hansen, a high schooler with social anxiety who miraculously finds himself at the center of a lie involving Connor Murphy, an outcast student who recently committed suicide. After his family mistakes one of Evan’s self-help letters to himself for Connor’s suicide note, he finds himself growing a false relationship with this family who believe that he was Connor’s last and only friend.

The premise of Dear Evan Hansen was already offputting to a number of viewers when it was a stage play but could be excused with all of the other positives of the stage play. This film adaptation strips away nearly everything that made the original so successful, removing its stage-dependent visual style and bafflingly recasting Ben Platt to play Evan Hansen despite him being over 25 years old. This jarring switch in mediums only made the issues with the film’s story that much more egregious, managing to annoy both fans of the musical and those unfamiliar with the original musical.

Watch on Freevee

4 ‘Can’t Stop the Music’ (1980)

Director: Nancy Walker

Acting as the cinematic equivalent of the last gasping breath of air for disco as an American institution, Can’t Stop the Music is a fictional biopic about the rise of hit band The Village People. While this acts as a jumping-off point for the film, it rarely actually follows anything close to a plot, as it’s mostly an excuse to show a collection of increasingly strange Village People music videos. However, there are attempts at acting and a story between each song, the likes of which are some of the worst that the decade had to offer.

Whether or not one is a fan of the Village People, early ’80s audiences were entirely sick of disco music by the time the film premiered, making it an immediate punching bag for just how disco-themed the experience was. The film has mostly floundered into obscurity, as it truly is nothing more than a collection of strange and loosely connected music videos, only barely reaching the minimum requirements to be considered a film. Can’t Stop the Music was actually so bad that, alongside Xanadu, it was directly responsible for the creation of the infamous anti-awards body, The Razzies.

Rent on Amazon

3 ‘From Justin to Kelly’ (2003)

Director: Robert Iscove

Featuring and starring the winner and runner-up of the first season of American Idol, Kelly Clarkson and Justin Guarini, From Justin to Kelly attempted to capitalize on their newfound success as rising music stars. The film sees the duo playing the similarly named Kelly Taylor and Justin Bell, who find themselves bonding and fostering a relationship during a special Spring Break, thanks to their shared love of all things music.

Few musicals have been as transparently corporate and a cash grab as From Justin to Kelly, having very few legs to stand on aside from the then popularity of its leads. However, even fans of American Idol couldn’t find quality in this film, as it became blatantly apparent that, no matter how well this duo could sing, they were far from actors and shared little to no chemistry with each other. Over 20 years after this release, From Justin to Kelly serves as a harsh reminder of the worst that culture had to offer in the early 2000s, musical or otherwise.

Rent on Amazon

2 ‘Cats’ (2019)

Director: Tom Hooper

Easily the most infamous movie musical disaster to come out in recent memory, Cats transformed an already polarizing Broadway show into a chaotic onslaught of offputting visuals and lackluster narrative. The film’s story is parallel to that of the original show, following an array of different Jellicle cats, each with signature Jellicle numbers and motivations, as the Jellicle tribe decides a single Jellicle cat will ascend to the Heaviside Layer.

The original Cats show was anything but a showcase for its narrative, as it acted more as a turnabout way to have expressive choreographed sequences and dazzling set designs. This film adaptation removes all the charm and elegance of the stage play by putting all of its sets and characters under a thick layer of gross and uncomfortable CGI designs. This, on top of the already wild and non-commercial premise, immediately made Catsa chaotic so-bad-it’s-good laughingstock that comes around only once in a generation.

Cats

Release Date

December 20, 2019

Runtime

110 minutes

Writers

Lee Hall , Tom Hooper , Andrew Lloyd Webber

Watch on Netflix

1 ‘Glitter’ (2001)

Director: Vondie Curtis-Hall

Glitter is the type of notoriously terrible failure that almost immediately etches itself a place in the history books as one of the biggest film disasters of all time. The film follows the story of young, rising pop star Billie Frank (Mariah Carey), who has struggled with a lengthy career working for nightclubs and bars. She finally makes her breakthrough after meeting record producer Timothy Walker (Terrence Howard) and finds herself falling in love with DJ Julian «Dice» Black (Max Beesley).

A massive trend that defined musicals throughout the ’90s and early 2000s was to simply have already massive pop stars take leading roles to latch on to their audience of fans, coming at the cost of their inexperience in acting. No such case is as egregious and painful as Glitter, with Mariah Carey giving an astonishingly underwhelming lead performance despite being a great singer. Outside of her performance, Glitter is simultaneously as formulaic and inept as movies come, adding nothing new to the table and entirely relying on tired old clichés.

Buy on Amazon

NEXT: The 10 Worst Western Movies of All Time