After less than four weeks in theaters, Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis has grossed more than $106 million in the U.S. and Canada, according to boxofficemojo.com. The film, starring Austin Butler as the King, Elvis Presley, is already the fourth-highest-grossing music biopic since the mid-1970s.
How high will it climb on the list of top-grossing music biopics? It’s off to a fast start, but it’s not even halfway to matching the “domestic” (meaning U.S. and Canada) grosses of the leader. (Can you guess what that is? All will be revealed.)
The 25 biopics of musicians on this list cover a wide range of genres. Pop/rock artists are the focus of eight the 25 films, followed by R&B (four); rap and traditional pop (three each); country, Latin and classical (two each); and contemporary Christian (one).
Biopics of five of the 10 artists who comprised the inaugural induction class at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame dot this list. In addition to Elvis, there are biopics here of James Brown, Ray Charles, Buddy Holly and Jerry Lee Lewis.
Methodology: Boxofficemojo.com maintains lists of top-grossing films searchable by dozens of “genre keywords.” Under “music,” we manually extracted biopics, which we define as films in which actors portray the musicians. Four of the biopics listed here aren’t listed under music on the boxofficemojo.com site, so we manually inserted them, using boxoffice figures found elsewhere on the site.
Boxofficemojo.com’s research dates back to the mid-1970s, so music biopics released before that, such as 1972’s Lady Sings the Blues (about Billie Holiday) and 1968’s Funny Girl (about Fanny Brice) aren’t listed here. But a sequel to Funny Girl, released in 1975, is present and accounted for.
