As the Springsteen movie disappoints at the box office, is music biopic fatigue setting in?
The genre has boomed in recent years, but we might have seen the peak.
The life of The Boss; the guy from “The Bear”; a smattering of decent feedback from audiences and critics alike — while “Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere,” which landed in theaters on Friday, may never have posted “A Minecraft Movie”-level numbers, the ~$9 million the movie hauled domestically over the weekend was a little disappointing.
Glory Days
As you might expect, the movie follows Hollywood’s increasingly tried and tested music biopic formula, charting the rising star of a now household name and the early tribulations they had to overcome in getting there. The film finds Bruce Springsteen, played by Jeremy Allen White, in a period of transition, working on his 1982 album “Nebraska” and struggling on the cusp of full-blown international stardom. While The Boss would go on to find global success with his next album, the fortunes of the music biopic movie genre don’t seem quite so bright in 2025.
Earlier this year, when picking up a Screen Actors Guild Award for his role as Bob Dylan in 2024’s “A Complete Unknown,” Timothée Chalamet conceded that the genre he was working in “could be perhaps tired” — and American movie audiences in 2025 seem to be in broad agreement.
While the Springsteen film’s gross over the weekend isn’t actually too far off the $11.7 million that the Dylan picture mustered on its open last December, it pales in comparison to the huge figures biopics like “Straight Outta Compton” and “Bohemian Rhapsody” garnered, and is still less than a third of the sums that “Bob Marley: One Love” and “Elvis” pulled in.
With a biopic on the King of Pop set to land next year, and separate efforts on each of the four Beatles slated for a couple of years after that, it would be ill advised to sound the death knell on the big-star-origin-story genre just yet. At least for now, however, audiences seem to have cooled on the format.
