In honor of the upcoming Genre-ary DailyView starting on New Year’s Day 2024, I added a New Year in Review category: Movie Musicals.

I have always enjoyed a good musical, and there feels as if the genre has taken a turn back up over the last few years so this seems to be a good time to introduce this new award.

What is a musical? Well, I find this to be a little iffy of a definition that maybe everyone would not agree with, and that is okay. This is my site. To me, there is a difference between a movie that is a musical and a movie that features music. To me, a musical should have songs that just happen during scenes. This is Spinal Tap has a lot of music, but I do not consider that a musical. It is a movie with music. 

Having said that, a film like This is Spinal Tap could conceivably get this award, but I would consider any of the ‘pure’ musicals first. It is possible that there may be some years where there are no great musicals and I have to acquiesce to a movie with music instead. There are some examples below…

As a celebration of the musical genre, I have retrofitted the last ten years with honorary award winners (much like I did for the Christopher Reeve Comic Book Movie Award). These retro musical award winners are here:

Movie Musicals

Inside Llewyn Davis (2013), Whiplash (2014), Pitch Perfect 2 (2015), La La Land (2016), The Greatest Showman (2017), Mary Poppins Returns (2018), Rocketman (2019), Hamilton (2020), Tick, Tick… Boom! (2021), Matilda the Musical (2022)

To be fair, a few of these retro-winners would not necessarily fall into the “Movie Musical” category such as Whiplash, Inside Llewyn Davis and Pitch Perfect 2, but there were no standout musicals in those years that I could fine. Then, Mary Poppins Returns probably was selected because it was a more traditional musical over some much better Movies with music from that year. 

Anyway, for 2023:

Runners-Up: I had intended on giving this award to Wonka, but it got dethroned. It was a lot of surprising fun. Disney has a couple of entries here with Wish and The Little Mermaid, both solid musicals. Trolls back Together falls into the category and Leo was one I just watched and was surprised how much I enjoyed the music in that.

And that brings us to the winner, a film I saw TODAY…

Winner: The Color Purple

I loved this movie. It was so well done, with amazing acting across the board and some vey engaging music that had me bobbing my head and tapping my foot throughout. It came up to the final moment of my movie viewing for 2023 and ran away with this new award.