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So, perhaps you’ve heard: La La Land didn’t win best picture at the Oscars.

But if every cloud has a silver lining, this one might be called golden: The Emma Stone-Ryan Gosling musical, which did win six Oscars, has been racking up box office numbers remarkable for a musical — nearly $417 million globally so far, according to comScore, a marketing analytics firm — and even more for an original one with no previously known songs or story. Damien Chazelle’s eye-popping, toe-tapping creation ranks third in all live-action film musicals, behind Mamma Mia! (2008) and Les Miserables (2012), neither of them original.

“That’s big-time money,” said Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst at comScore. “At times, the musical genre has been marginalized or not taken seriously. But this is serious business.”

‘Beauty’ blockbuster expected

It’s enough to make a musical fan break into sudden, joyful song, perhaps on the way to the multiplex, where this weekend Emma Watson’s Beauty and the Beast is expected to have a huge, $120 million-style opening.

And there’s a slew of other live-action musicals in the works, a combination of originals, sequels and remakes.

This Christmas, we’ll have Hugh Jackman as P.T. Barnum in The Greatest Showman, with music by La La Land lyricists Benj Pasek and Justin Paul. A year later will come the high-profile Mary Poppins Returns with Emily Blunt, Lin-Manuel Miranda and Meryl Streep, among others.

Also reportedly on tap: a Will Ferrell-Kristen Wiig original musical about the little-known world of corporate musicals, and a Josh Gad musical with songs by Broadway luminaries Alan Menken and Stephen Schwartz. A musical version of the Broadway megahit Wicked is also coming down the pike.

“Good movies beget other good movies,” said Marc Platt, a producer of La La Land, not to mention the upcoming Mary Poppins Returns and Wicked films. “So when a movie captures the imagination and hearts of people around the world, it’s going to have a positive influence on similar genres getting made.”

A rebirth?

Is the musical undergoing a renaissance, or at least a major moment? Or is it all just a happy coincidence? Certainly, it’s been a great time for musicals on Broadway, where Miranda’s Hamilton has been breaking all kinds of records since it opened in July 2015. And on TV, there’s been the trend of live musicals like Grease, Peter Pan and Hairspray.

“I don’t think it’s a coincidence,” said Mandy Moore, the choreographer of La La Land, who’s also worked extensively in television. “I think it went away for a while, that style of storytelling, and that style of music, and it’s like anything — bell bottoms were cool, and then they were not cool, and then they were cool again. People throw it away for a while and then come back to it and remember, ‘Oh, that was really cool, and why don’t we reinvent it?’ ”

To Menken, who composed the music for Beauty and the Beast and many other musicals, the moment for musicals has been happening “for quite a while.”

“Look at the box office,” he said in a recent interview, listing Hamilton and a slew of other Broadway shows, by him and others. “It’s just an explosion of musicals.”

Platt and Moore, of La La Land, also point to the younger creative voices injecting life into musicals in various forms; Chazelle is 32, and Miranda is 37.

Contemporary spin

“It’s part of the evolution of the art,” said Platt. “You have new young voices who grew up seeing the world in a certain way, and hearing the world in a certain way. And what’s really interesting is … they’re all steeped in the history of the genre. Lin-Manuel and Benj and Justin can tell you every piece of musical theater history, the way that Damien can tell you the history of great American and French New Wave musical cinema. And so they’re taking from the past, drawing on what they’ve learned and studied, but putting it through the lens and the filter of their very contemporary world.”

Beauty director Bill Condon credits animated musical films with getting audiences comfortable with the simple act of a character breaking into song.

“And then if you let it happen, it turns out that the audience actually loves that,” Condon said. “There’s a wider audience for it, for just the joy of breaking out into song. It feels like the audience has caught up again.”

They may have caught up, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to be easy for future screen musicals to capture the La La Land magic, said Dergarabedian of comScore.

“It’s not going to happen every year,” he said. “That was lightning in a bottle.”
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U.N. refugee agency special envoy Angelina Jolie made an impassioned plea Wednesday for internationalism in the face of wars driving people from their homes and a “rising tide of nationalism masquerading as patriotism.”

The Hollywood actress, speaking at the United Nations in Geneva, called for a renewed commitment to the “imperfect” world body and to diplomacy to settle conflicts.

“If governments and leaders are not keeping that flame of internationalism alive today, then we as citizens must,” Jolie said in the annual Sergio Vieira de Mello lecture honoring the veteran U.N. aid worker killed in a Baghdad bombing in 2003.

“We see a rising tide of nationalism, masquerading as patriotism, and the re-emergence of policies encouraging fear and hatred of others,” she warned.

Jolie did not refer directly to U.S. President Donald Trump, whose administration is reviewing its funding of the United Nations and its participation in the U.N. Human Rights Council.

“A lot of the fear we observe today of refugees, of foreigners, is produced by ignorance, often fueling politicians as well,” she said in response to a question.

“We have to recognize the damage we do when we undermine the U.N. or use it selectively — or not at all — or when we rely on aid to do the job of diplomacy, or give the U.N. impossible tasks and then underfund it.”

Not a single humanitarian appeal to donor governments worldwide has received even half the amount needed, she said.

Operations in four countries where 20 million people are on the brink of death from starvation — Yemen, Somalia, South Sudan and Nigeria — are severely underfunded.

Jolie, who described herself as “a proud American” and “an internationalist,” has worked since 2001 for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), visiting uprooted civilians from Iraq to Cambodia and Kenya.
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The new documentary Trophy opens in a sprawling corner of South Africa run by John Hume, who is praised by some as protecting the continent’s rhinos from extinction and vilified by others for trying to turn the animals into cash spinners.

Trophy, shown this week at the South by Southwest film festival in Austin, examines how efforts to commercialize wild animals and encourage big-game hunting in Africa can generate funds for conservation, while also arousing criticism.

“We want the viewer to go through a roller coaster of being challenged and being confused,” filmmaker Shaul Schwarz said in an interview, adding there were no easy answers for protecting Africa’s big game.

How to protect wildlife

Trophy looks at people like Hume, the world’s largest private rhino breeder, who has spent large sums to protect the animals from poachers seeking to kill them for their horns.

Hume trims the tips of the horns from his 1,500 rhinos every two years, building a stockpile worth tens of millions of dollars that he wants to sell. He is lobbying to make the trade legal and use proceeds to protect more rhinos.

Some conservationists criticize him for wanting to turn a wild animal into a commodity, similar to the treatment of livestock.

Rhino horns, which can grow back, sell for prices higher than gold in parts of Asia where there is a belief, unfounded by science, that they can cure cancer.

Because of Asian demand, rhino poaching in South Africa surged to a record 1,215 animals in 2014. South Africa has about 20,000 rhinos, or about 80 percent of the world’s rhino population.

Game resorts and hunting

The film also asks questions about the role of game resorts sustained by hunting that can restore African ecosystems.

Tourists on photo safaris may spend a few hundred dollars a night to stay at an African game lodge, while a hunter can be paying several thousand dollars a night to kill game.

Data is scarce on how much money hunting generates across Africa. But in South Africa, the Environment Ministry has said the hunting industry is worth about 6.2 billion rand ($485 million) a year.

A license to hunt a lion in southern Africa can go for about $50,000. International agencies regulate some of the hunts and direct that proceeds be used to support conservation efforts in impoverished parts of the continent.

During filming, hunting became a global issue after an American trophy hunter in 2015 killed a lion named Cecil, provoking an international outcry.

After that, Schwarz and fellow filmmaker Christina Clusiau lost access to some sources who feared backlash.

“It is hard to wrap your head around the idea that to conserve something, sometimes we may have to kill,” Clusiau said.
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