Action Films That Would Make Great Musicals
Historically speaking, action movies and musicals have always been mutually exclusive. But what if that changed? What if we woke up tomorrow, and found out that we were living in a parallel universe where everybody had a penchant for song and dance, and chose to sing instead of speak like we were living in Grease?
Think about what kind of world we’d be living in. Imagine if your favorite action movie had a musical segue between every scene that carried the plot forward through the use of blistering dance routines, and choreography that was more intense than the explosions that your typical action movie celebrates.
So let’s test this thought experiment out, and turn some of our favorite action movies into musicals. What will the songs be called? Will there be finger-snapping and cool outfits? Let’s find out, shall we?
Kill Bill series (2003-2004)
Transforming the Kill Bill movies into a musical is a lot easier than it sounds. Beatrix Kiddo has already alluded to the deadly use of the Five-Point-Palm Exploding-Heart-Technique. So what if we got the guys from Five Finger Death Punch to do a musical adaptation?
We can really turn the amps up to 11 on this one, and transform this two-part Quentin Tarantino saga into a nu-metal odyssey full of half-step breakdowns, boasting songs like “The Ultimate Betrayal,” and “Fool Me Twice, Shame on Bill.”
If we wanted to stay true to the nu-metal aesthetic, we could even swap out Uma Thurman’s yellow tracksuit with a pair of JNCO’s, and replace her Hattori Hanzo Sword with a chainsaw.
And just like nu metal, this musical adaptation will be critically reviled at first, but will ultimately have staying power 20 years after its initial release.
The Matrix series (1999-2021)
Moving onto the Matrix series, there are a lot of ways to turn this franchise into a musical journey into the simulation by the likes of which we’ve never seen.
Morpheus already makes the rabbit-hole analogy when presenting Neo with the blue pill and red pill, so there’s already a nod to the 1886 H. Savile Clarke musical adaptation of Lewis Carrol’s Alice in Wonderland that we could draw inspiration from.
That is to say, when Neo chooses the red pill, he can be whisked away into the whimsical land of the Matrix, and play a rousing game of chess that symbolizes his battle with predetermined fate while solving reverse riddles a la Through the Looking-Glass.
Everybody’s already wearing a cool black pair of shades, so The Matrix series is pretty much begging for a couple song and dance numbers. Just imagine what we could do with songs like “The Red Pill Chose Me,” and “Love is a Bullet That We Cannot Dodge.”
Get Danny Elfman on the phone, and we can green light this project immediately.
Mission: Impossible Series (1996-present)
Tom Cruise already famously does his own stunts. We’d venture to say that learning a pop-and-lock routine for Mission: Impossible – The Musical – Part One, the Prequel Before the Sequel is probably way easier than driving a motorcycle off of a cliff.
Since the iconic theme music heard throughout the Mission: Impossible franchise already has a lounge vibe going for it, we can get really swanky with this one.
What if the famous wire heist scene from 1996’s Mission: Impossible had a musical accompaniment, entitled “Don’t Leave Me Hanging All Alone?” Or if Ethan Hunt finds that his romance with Claire Phelps is on the rocks, he can win her back over with a heartwarming rendition of “This Love Will Self-Destruct in Five Minutes.”
The Fast and the Furious Series (2001-present)
Dominic Toretto loves fast cars. Dominic Toretto loves family. But what if Dominic Toretto loved a good musical number as well?
Close your eyes, and clear your mind for a second, and imagine a super-group called Furious Dom & the Family Band. Vin Diesel already has a solo project, Ludacris is a certified multi-platinum artist, Dwayne Johnson knows how to rap, and Jason Momoa has been spotted in the wild playing some seriously impressive bass guitar licks with Les Claypool from Primus during his downtime.
All of the components for a Fast and Furious musical are already there, we just have to start an aggressive email campaign to get this thing lifted. Songs like “I Stole the Vault to Your Heart,” and “Cypher Me This, Cypher Me That” will pretty much write themselves if the opportunity presents itself.
John Wick series (2014-present)
Speaking of bass players, Keanu Reeves has been playing the four string thing for ages, and even recently reunited with his old band, Dogstar.
Keanu Reeves is also refreshingly self-aware and humble, so if we ask him nicely, maybe we can see a John Wick musical come to fruition. After killing three men with a pencil, he can bust out a funky groove while belting out “There’s No ‘I’ In Dog.”
Considering how much gunplay the John Wick movies have, it’s not outside the realm of possibility that we could incorporate elements of the musical STOMP into the mix.
Using found sounds like gunshots, explosions, and trash can lids being beaten over somebody’s head, we can be taken away to a percussive world of revenge and violence that also has a snappy backbeat to move things along.
Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)
Did you know that some of those crazy guitar parts from Mad Max: Fury Road were composed by Nick Zinner from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs? There’s already a wall of beaten-up speakers on one of the nitro-trucks, so this action movie is just begging to be adapted into a musical.
The chase sequences in Fury Road are already exhilarating, but they could be even more so if Mad Max and Furiosa emotionally sang “Take Me to the Green Place.” But through their trials and tribulations, and after all the violence and carnage, they find out that The Green Place simply represented the friends they made along the way.
Indiana Jones series (1981-present)
The Indiana Jones series already boasts an amazing score by John Williams, so we honestly wouldn’t have to do much to make a musical out of it.
Songs like “This Temple is Doomed,” and “My Fedora Has a First Name” could transition seamlessly into the action sequences that we all know and love. And when things really heat up, we can be stunned into submission through the use of expertly placed tempo-changes.
But the real clincher here is getting the new-wave band Devo to sign on for an orchestral version of “Whip It” that can be used throughout the musical. We’ll just hand over the blank check made out to “cash” now. All you have to do is sign it.
The Terminator (1984)
Arnold Schwarzenegger has done it all at this point. He’s won bodybuilding competitions. He’s starred in more high-grossing blockbusters than we can even count. He was even the governor of California for heck’s sake.
But he’s never starred in a feature-length musical, and that changes now.
In the T-800’s quest to locate and eliminate Sarah Connor, we’ll find him once again at the West Highland Police Station. But when he’s told that he can’t see Sarah Connor because she’s busy making a statement, he starts to sing “I’ll Be Back, and You Better Believe it.”
After the sparklers and the fanfare, he drives his car through the front of the building and murders 17 people. And when Sarah Connor finally gets the upper hand, she hops onto a motorcycle, and drives off into the sunset to the tune of “So Many Stars in the Skynet.”
