George Goldspink wasn’t sure whether Tiger Tiger in Newcastle upon Tyne was ready for the “bearded lady” he had hired to lip-sync to This Is Me, the biggest number from the biggest film surprise of the year. The events planner had arranged a student club night with The Greatest Showman theme, and wanted to honour its feelgood anthem for outcasts.
“But it’s a bit of a ballad and it’s absolutely rogue for a nightclub to put on a song like that because it could just kill the atmosphere,” says the 25-year-old former whale trainer from Norwich. His Goldflake Events company puts on weekly “Tiger Wednesday” nights for Newcastle University students. The Greatest Showman night, on 14 March, also included fire-breathers, snakes and Brazilian dancers.
Goldspink is a big fan of the musical film, which stars Hugh Jackman as the 19th-century American circus pioneer PT Barnum, and has songs by the Oscar winners behind La La Land. He has seen it eight times, and was confident people would come to the themed club night, but the demand stunned him. “We had just over 1,500 students in, our biggest night since freshers’ week,” he says. “There was a group of 10 who came 100 miles from Leeds. And when we played that song, it absolutely went off. It was a huge, huge hit.”
The film, modestly promoted before its UK release last Boxing Day – and showered with lukewarm reviews – has generated a big-tent appeal that would have astonished Barnum himself. Three months on, and last weekend it was still among the top five grossing films in the UK. The soundtrack, released in early January, has spent 11 weeks at the top of the album charts. (This Is Me, sung on screen – with a beard – by Broadway actor Keala Settle, who plays one of Barnum’s troupe of “freaks and oddities”, is still in the UK Top 10 singles chart.)
Meanwhile, an unprecedented run of sing-along screenings at more than 550 cinemas across Britain has fuelled the juggernaut, drawing fans back to screens to be whipped into excitement with a pre-credits warmup, and assisted with on-screen lyrics. Twentieth Century Fox, which co-produced the film, says the screenings have added more than £1.2m to its total UK box office gross of £40m. “What’s so unusual about it is the way it’s performed so consistently,” says Tom Grater, who follows the film charts at Screen International. “It didn’t have a particularly spectacular opening weekend but it has just rolled and rolled.”
After opening with £2.58m, The Greatest Showman took more than £1m on 12 consecutive weekends, an almost unheard-of feat. Twelve weeks after its opening weekend, Star Wars: The Last Jedi, by far the biggest release of December, took just £763, largely because it had pretty much left cinemas. We have to wind back two decades to find films with such staying power; in 1997, Titanic took at least £1m for 12 weeks, while The Full Monty achieved that for an unmatched 13 weeks. Only last weekend did The Greatest Showman dip below the £1m mark. Fox is now promoting its digital release next month; the DVD follows in May.
The film plays to the broadest audience, from students at Newcastle’s Tiger Tiger to pensioners at Eastbourne’s Cineworld. Word-of-mouth marketing, catchy, contemporary songs – and a lot of repeat viewings – have outflanked critical derision. The New York Times dismissed The Greatest Showman as “a montage sequence that occasionally turns into a movie musical”. At the reviews site Rotten Tomatoes, the film has a 55% score among critics (and 38% among top critics) – but an 88% audience rating.
“And it’s all genuine,” says Clare Binns, deputy managing director of the Picturehouse cinema chain, and an unapologetic Greatest Showman superfan. She scotches notions of an ironic, so-bad-it’s-good appeal among time-rich millennials. “It’s audiences being fully aware of what they’re going to see and knowing they’re going to have a good time. It’s Mamma Mia!, not Birdman.”
Binns, who is 63, recalls dumping her bags after travelling home from the Sundance film festival last January and racing to the Prince Charles cinema in London to catch the first Greatest Showman sing-along screening with her 26-year-old daughter. “I’d just seen 40 films and travelled through the night, but the opportunity was too good to miss, and it was absolutely fantastic,” she says. “And it was everyone – there were single blokes, families, older people, groups of students.”
Picturehouses are still showing the film, and put on a countrywide sing-along screening for Mother’s Day. “Maybe it’s the current climate, where everybody’s a bit gloomy. It’s just … fun,” Binns adds. She also wonders if the word-of-mouth mill is slowly grinding down sceptics. “I think it has picked up that momentum because people are starting to think it’s OK – they’re just going for it.”
Paul Vickery, head of programming at the Prince Charles cinema in London, says sing-along screenings are on track to outperform even Frozen, which it sold out for two years after the Disney hit’s release in 2013. The cinema, which has become a centre for sing-alongs, has just extended its twice-weekly screenings through the summer. One fan has already been 18 times, while a birthday party of 19 young people attended the first screening. “It was still a new film then, but we had 300 people, many in fancy dress, and they all knew every word to every song,” Vickery recalls.
Goldspink began with an interest in the circus; the marine biology graduate used to train animals for shows at Pleasurewood Hills, a theme park in Suffolk. But he says the film’s crowd-pleasing themes of forbidden love and circus “freaks” fighting for acceptance are what set it apart. “It’s just so feel-good,” he says. “The songs have a lot of punch and you can really relate to them.”
Goldflake Events says it has been flooded with inquiries from non-student fans, and is now in talks with Tiger Tiger to put on a weekend version of the club night next month. “This craze is not going anywhere,” says Goldspink. He says friends of his watch the film once a week. “There has to be a West End show. There is just something about it. Even though you know exactly what’s going to happen in the next scene, it’s become a family classic overnight.”
