Elvis is the Top Gun: Maverick of music biopics
polygon.comMusical biographies are one of the most reliable genres in Hollywood’s arsenal. They trade on singalong appeal, showy star performances, and brand recognition that would make even Disney envious, and they’re often box-office bankers: The 2018 Queen biopic Bohemian Rhapsody made an incredible $911 million worldwide. So it’s surprising that it’s taken until 2022 for anyone to make a large-scale biopic about the greatest music icon of them all, the originator of rock stardom, Elvis Presley. And it turns out that Moulin Rouge! director Baz Luhrmann is the perfect choice to make an Elvis movie.
Since his run at movie stardom in the 1960s, the King has haunted cinema like a ghost. He’s been summoned as a symbolic spirit by Val Kilmer in True Romance and Bruce Campbell in Bubba Ho-Tep. His distinctive cadences and energy have been channeled into other, fictional roles, like Nicolas Cage’s Sailor Ripley in Wild at Heart. His legend has been dissected and explored for meaning by questing documentaries like The King. But only one drama has told his story straight: 1979’s Elvis, directed by horror maven John Carpenter and starring Kurt Russell. It’s a decent TV movie that decorously draws the curtain in 1970, before Presley’s decline and death.
Perhaps filmmakers have been reticent to take on his story because Presley’s iconography is intimidating in two ways: for its power and for its fragility. Everything about him has been internalized, rehashed, parodied, and remixed by popular culture to such an extent that it seems impossible to look at afresh, or to take at face value. His otherworldly looks and his eccentric mannerisms; his journey from ineffable cool to gaudy kitsch; his moves, his poses and his voice, that voice, with its
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