Released on August 14, 2015, Straight Outta Compton earned $200 million against its $50 million budget, thus making it both a critical and a commercial success. Given its name, it should come as no surprise to learn that it featured the rise of Eazy-E, Ice Cube, Dr. Dre, and other members of N.W.A., who can claim much of the credit for having popularized the gangsta rap genre in the late 1980s. However, just as interesting is what Straight Outta Compton‘s success could mean for band biopics, seeing as how it has shown that music fans are more than willing to pay to see movies about their favorite musicians.
Here are five examples of bands that should have band biopics of their own:
Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five
Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five can claim the distinction of having been the first hip-hop group to be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Furthermore, their music influenced a wide range of musicians in a wide range of genres, so much so that some of their gear is actually displayed in the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. Summed up, it is clear that there is a story just waiting to be told about these true pioneers of their art.
Milli Vanilli
A biopic about Milli Vanilli would not be a labor of love so much as a showcase of the German R&B duo’s spectacular rise and just as spectacular fall. For those who are unfamiliar with what happened, Fab Morvan and Rob Pilatus’s debut album Girl You Know It’s True brought them so much success that they actually won the Grammy Award for Best New Artist on February 21, 1990. However, their lip-synching soon came out at a live performance where the recording jammed and began to skip. In fact, it turned out that neither of the two had contributed to the vocals, thus resulting in massive condemnation as well as a wave of lawsuits.
Nirvana
Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck came out on April 9, 2015. Although it was not a band biopic, the success of the documentary about the Nirvana front-man showed that there is still plenty of interest in the flagship band of Generation X. In fact, it wouldn’t be surprising to learn that there are already people in Hollywood who are attempting to make something about Nirvana, particularly since the grunge band would provide them with such a wide range of subjects, ranging from how the band-members reacted to their meteoric success to the relationship between Cobain and Courtney Love.
The Spice Girls
Yes, the Spice Girls had Spice World, but that wasn’t a biopic but rather a musical comedy centered around the fictional exploits of the pop girl group. Instead, what would be really interesting would be a behind-the-scenes look at what caused the departure of Geri Halliwell AKA Ginger Spice in 1998. Better still, their story would come with a natural conclusion in the form of their full reunion at the closing ceremony for the 2012 Summer Olympics in London.
TLC
TLC started out as Tionne “T-Boz” Watkins, Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes, and Rozonda “Chilli” Thomas, who had been assembled by a studio for the explicit purpose of creating a girl group with a tomboyish, hip-hop image. Over the course of their career, the trio managed to secure commercial success as well as the love of countless fans in spite of their spats with one another, their record label, and their management, all of which would make prime material for the movie screen.
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