In the Showdown Between ‘Mamma Mia!’ and ‘Across the Universe,’ The Wrong Film Won

Every once in a while, moviegoers have to choose between two movies trying to do more or less the same thing. Sometimes these choices end up being inconsequential. In the great lava-off of 1997, did it really matter if more people went to see Volcano or Dante’s Peak? Sometimes the consequences are little clearer. Armageddon outgrossing Deep Impact in 1999 assured that Michael Bay’s frenetic filmmaking would remain the dominant blockbuster style for years. And sometimes it’s only in retrospect that the choice even becomes apparent, as in the dramatically different jukebox musicals that appeared in 2007 and 2008: Across the Universe and Mamma Mia!, a months-apart match-up that helped steer movie musicals down a safer, duller path.

First, some background: In the years after Moulin Rouge! and Chicago made critical and commercial waves, Hollywood rediscovered an interest in making live action musicals. By the mid-’00s, the once-moribund genre began popping up semi-regularly, at least when compared to the decades that preceded it. Meanwhile, Broadway embraced the jukebox musical, plays constructed around the songs of a popular artist, like the Billy Joel musical Movin’ Out or the Four Seasons musical Jersey Boys.

The two trends were destined to collide, and collide they did, first in the fall of 2007 with the release of Across the Universe and again the following summer with Mamma Mia!. The former, directed by Julie Taymor, repurposes the songs of the Beatles in an attempt to tell a sprawling story about the 1960s and what they meant. The latter, directed by Phyllida Lloyd, adapts the Abba-fueled musical that made the jukebox musical so popular in the first place. One is strange, experimental, and cinematic. The other is pedestrian, usually content to just point its camera at the actors as they sang and danced against lovely Mediterranean scenery. One cast its actors at least in part on their ability to sing. The other featured Pierce Brosnan.

Finally, one died at the box office and the other became a hit, spawned a sequel, and helped ensure that future big screen jukebox musicals, like Jersey Boys, would follow a straight and narrow path without any experimental flourishes. Moviegoers had spoken. They wanted to hear new versions of old songs with Meryl Streep in overalls and without nightmarish sequences dramatizing the inescapability of America’s military-industrial complex at the height of the Cold War, thank you very much.

Which is a shame for a couple of reasons. Not only is Across the Universe worth seeing —and it’s worth mentioning here that it’s now available to stream on Netflix— it’s painful to consider the more daring jukebox musicals we might have gotten if this, not Mamma Mia!, had been successful. (Or, to take a more generous view, if both films had been successful. Mamma Mia! is a good-enough movie and last year’s more cinematic, more emotionally rich sequel is better still.) Collectively, we chose poorly.

We also took the easier choice. Across the Universe is a challenging film, which is another way of saying it doesn’t always work but the moments when it does make up for those in which it falls on its face. And sometimes such moments are inextricably entwined. One example: T.V. Carpio plays Prudence, an Ohioan who makes her way to New York city, driven in part by her struggle to come to terms with her attraction to women. At one point, this leads her to sulk — in a closet, no less — in the run-down Greenwich Village apartment she shares with most of the main characters. To coax her out, her friends sing “Dear Prudence.” (Her name, like most of the character names, is both a nod to a Beatles song and a set-up to a performance of the same). But just as the corniness becomes unbearable — however lovely the cast’s rendition of the song — something kind of magical happens. Taymor uses digital effects to melt the background of their apartment into an impossibly blue sky then drops everyone into the middle of a protest.

The world is much bigger than Prudence’s closet and Taymor doesn’t illustrate this subtly. Instead, she commits to going over the top in the most gorgeous way imaginable. That’s pretty much the film in miniature. It’s as if Taymor — who reworked with story with screenwriters Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais, who originated the idea — realized she couldn’t use such well-known songs to revisit such a much-depicted era without touching on cliches. Instead, she she decided to touch on every cliche possible, having lead characters Jude (Jim Sturgess), Lucy (Evan Rachel Wood), and Maxwell (Joe Anderson) encounter hippie gurus, the Vietnam War, drugs, and leftists radicals while using the Beatles catalog at moments so on-the-nose even Robert Zemeckis might blush.

Yet it works. Well, mostly at least. The romance between Jude, a working-class Liverpudlian who travels to America in search of his father, and Lucy, a child of middle-class American privilege, never develops much depth. Nor, for that matter, does much else in Across the Universe. Enjoying the film means accepting its superficiality. In one scene, Maxwell is shown becoming addicted to drugs to the tune of “Happiness is a Warm Gun” (and with the help of a cameo from Taymor’s Frida star Salma Hayek) as he recovers from an injury in Vietnam. A few scenes later he’s apparently fine. The film doesn’t so much engage with the ’60s as turn them into a pageant.

But what a pageant. Taymor discovers remarkable possibilities revisiting the psychedelic visuals of the ’60s using the tools of the ’00s and experimental theatrical instincts she developed via mask- and puppet-filled productions of Oedipus Rex, The Magic Flute and, most famously, The Lion King. Sometimes this means letting reality fade into fantasy via CGI. Other times it means using practical effects to create surreal imagery, as in a scene of underwear-clad military recruits stomping on trees as they carry a giant model of the Statue of Liberty across a Vietnamese landscape accompanied by “I Want You (She’s So Heavy).”

Again, this is not a subtle movie. Nor is it always a smooth ride. After premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2007 it hit theaters in October, running 133 minutes after Taymor and Revolution Studios chairman Joe Roth publicly clashed over the final cut. Roth, against Taymor’s wishes, had tested a considerably shorter cut he considered more palatable to a wider audience. “This was a case of [the studio] smelling the money,” Taymor told a Tribeca Talks audience in 2016. “It wasn’t that it wasn’t working, [the studio] thought if we got rid of the black people, the lesbians, the politics, the Vietnam War… if we got rid of all of those things, we could have High School Musical.”

That money smell started to dissipate not long after Across the Universe‘s release. Some critics, like Roger Ebert, embraced it. Others were less kind. (“[I]t’s almost fun to pick out which use of the Beatles makes you gag the most,” Owen Gleiberman wrote in his Entertainment Weekly review.) The film opened in limited release on September 14th and never played more than 1000 theaters in the United States, eventually taking in a not-so-impressive $24 million at the domestic box office.

Yet, even if it Across the Universe didn’t triumph in 2007, it’s proven enduring, picking up a cult following over the years and, last fall, even returning to theaters for a three-night stand. That following seems likely to grow with its availability on Netflix, and it’s to see why. Its audacious confidence that audiences will follow wherever it leads them may make it cringe-y at times, but it also makes it unforgettable. Given a broad canvas and a budget that allowed her to film on location and turn whole blocks of New York into a ’60s wonderland, Taymor works to fill every inch of it with eye-catching imagery. (Oh, and some of those Beatles songs are pretty good, too.) Audiences took a while to catch on, but they found it eventually. Maybe someday movie musicals will catch up, too.

Keith Phipps writes about movies and other aspects of pop culture. You can find his work in such publications as The Ringer, Slate, Vulture, and Polygon. Keith also co-hosts the podcasts The Next Picture Show and Random Movie Night and lives in Chicago with his wife and child. Follow him on Twitter at @kphipps3000.

Where to stream Across The Universe