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Most Definitely Not a Musical - TV Tropes

  • ️Sat Aug 24 2024

There’s a trailer out for a new movie you’ve never heard of. You watch it, and it looks good! You diligently keep up with the film’s marketing, watching each new trailer when it releases. You learn more and more about the plot of the movie, and each new detail gets you more excited. When the film releases, you walk into the theater hoping it’s everything you imagined. Finally, the studio logos fade, the protagonist takes their first steps onto the screen, they open their mouth, and — wait, it’s a musical?!

This trope is an advertising trick that’s become increasingly common in The New '20s. Many musicals leave all or most of the songs out of their trailers, misleading the audience. Execution of this trope ranges from “brief clip of a song scene, in a context that makes it unclear that it’s one of multiple” to “not even a hint of the soundtrack”. In many cases, the movie’s creators will still reveal the movie’s musical nature in interviews, but they intentionally avoid mentioning this in more prominent advertisements, so potential viewers may not be aware of it. Sometimes, a few clips of a movie’s musical numbers will start to appear in the later advertisements as marketers become more confident that their movie will succeed, and trailers made after the film’s premiere frequently drop the façade for the same reason.

The motivations behind this trope are no mystery. Musicals are a niche genre that many people dislike, so movie marketers may try to “trick” people into watching them by hiding their musical elements. In the new '20s, the existing dislike of musicals amongst the general public was worsened by a slew of musical film flops in 2021 that tried and failed to cash in on the success of Hamilton, leading modern-day marketing teams to believe that including musical numbers in their trailers will lead to failure.

Subtrope of Never Trust a Trailer. Sometimes overlaps with Girl-Show Ghetto, as musicals are perceived as unmasculine by many. Often the result of real-life Musical Number Annoyance.

Examples:

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Anime 

  • The 2025 film of The Rose of Versailles only showed bits of the title song in the trailers, along with spoken scenes. In the actual film, there are about 10 songs sung by the characters (including Marie Antoinette and Fersen, whose voice actors (Aya Hirano and Kazuki Katō) do as many stage musicals as voice roles).

Films — Animation 

  • Trailers for The Bob's Burgers Movie focused more on the comedy and wild nature of the film and never gave any hints at all that it was a musical.
  • A variant of this trope was used in the trailers for Frozen 2. The film was expected to be a musical like its predecessor, but none of the sequel’s original songs appeared in any of its trailers. It’s likely that the advertisers wanted the success of the last movie to carry its sequel, and avoided revealing much about the new movie to encourage that, but the lack of songs in the trailers leads one to think that the marketers didn’t expect the new soundtrack to live up to the old one.
  • The trailers and TV spots for A Goofy Movie failed to mention a lot of major elements of the movie, including the fact that it’s a musical.
  • None of the trailers for Jonah: A VeggieTales Movie mentioned that the film was a musical. Clips from "Second Chances" with the audio dubbed over by another song and the narrator appeared in the final trailer.
  • Most fans of Miraculous Ladybug did not expect Ladybug & Cat Noir: The Movie to be a musical based on the trailers, especially since the series it’s based on is not. As this article mentions, some fans were confused by this.
  • Audiences failed to anticipate that Adam Sandler’s animated film Leo was a musical almost as much as they failed to anticipate the acclaim it would receive. Not a single one of the movie’s original songs featured in the trailers. The fact that many reviewers considered the songs to be mediocre at best may justify this decision on the part of the marketers — if the songs appeared in the trailers, it could have turned away many prospective viewers who would have loved the other elements of the film.
  • Moana 2’s advertisements so far seem to be using the same variant of the trope as Frozen 2, avoiding revealing any new songs.
  • Downplayed with Mufasa: The Lion King (the prequel to the 2019 remake of The Lion King); the trailers note that the film features new Lin-Manuel Miranda songs, but aside from brief snippets of "I Always Wanted a Brother", the full version of the song being shown at the D23 Expo, and a Japanese TV spot playing a snippet of "Milele", none of them are even hinted at in the clips.
  • None of the advertising for Playmobil: The Movie indicate that it's a musical, which was surprising to those who watched it.
  • The trailers for South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut focused on the comedic elements of the movie while heavily downplaying the fact that it’s a musical.
  • Spellbound (2024) is a musical with songs by Alan Menken and Glenn Slater (who handled, among other things, the Tangled song score) but there's absolutely no indication of it in its trailer, in favor of Advertising by Association the involvement of executive producer John Lasseter and director Vicky Jenson, who co-directed Shrek. This might have been because none of their films were musicals, with the diegetic exception of Coco. Instead, the trailer features Tone Lōc's "Wild Thing" and Journey's "Don't Stop Believin'".
  • Strange Magic was barely advertised in the first place, and on top of this, few of its trailers indicated that it was a Jukebox Musical.
  • In an unusual move for Disney, the ads for Tangled didn’t include any of the film’s musical numbers. Though “Disney Princess” movies are almost always musicals (with Brave and Raya and the Last Dragon being the two exceptions), the marketing of Tangled emphasized the comedy and tried to make the film look like a parody of Disney’s typical fairy-tale movies, and leaving out the musical aspect may have been part of this.

Films — Live-Action 

  • The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is a diegetic musical with many songs, which the advertising did not indicate.
  • Inverted in the trailer for the 1970 film adaptation of The Boys in the Band, which seemingly goes out of its way to present itself as a musical by playing a cover of the Cole Porter standard "Anything Goes" and repeatedly showing a bunch of gay chaps dancing and having a swell time. For as misleading as the trailer is, it finally averts Never Trust a Trailer at the last second when the voiceover bluntly states "It's not a musical."
  • The Color Purple is a well-known story with a beloved film adaptation, so when another film adaptation was announced, many expected to be a remake of the older movie, perhaps with some changes. The trailers sparked excitement for the film, but what they left out was the fact that the new movie is not a remake of the older live-action film, but a film adaptation of the stage musical, complete with lots of singing.
  • The first trailer for Dear Evan Hansen only features one clip of a character singing, and it’s in front of an audience. Though the stage play this movie is based on is a well-known musical, the advertisers seemed to be trying to mislead those who aren’t familiar with the source material.
  • Disenchanted is a downplayed example. Those who remember the first movie would expect it to be a musical, but not a single one of its original songs was featured in the trailers, possibly in an attempt to mislead those who forgot about the first movie’s musical numbers.
  • The first trailer for Into the Woods completely hid the fact that the film is a musical, though later trailers did begin to show the characters singing.
  • Zigzagged by Joker: Folie à Deux. Most of the early trailers betrayed no hint of the film’s nature as a Jukebox Musical, other than the odd choice of casting Lady Gaga as Harley Quinn. Later trailers did show a bit of the film’s musical side, but the director still does not consider the film a musical, stating that “Most of the film’s music is really dialogue” (ignoring the fact that this is true of many musicals).
  • Besides the music note in the logo, very little of the advertising for Mean Girls (2024) indicates that it features songs from the Mean Girls musical. The tag line "Plastic Is Forever" fooled many into thinking it was a sequel. As indicated by the film itself cutting many songs from the original musical and changing the style of the remaining tunes to distance them from their Broadway origins, the marketers were likely terrified that their movie would fall prey to the backlash against musicals in the early 2020s.
  • Les Misérables (2012) used a downplayed version of this trope, despite being based on a very famous musical. The trailers notably left out the majority of the singing in favor of spoken dialogue, which the actual film contains extremely little of. The first trailer featured no songs other than “I Dreamed a Dream”, and while the later trailers included a bit more music, they were still disproportionately dialogue-heavy compared to the sung-through musical film. Some TV spots even use an unused spoken version of the line “I know you! You’re Jean Valjean!”
  • The trailers and publicity campaign for Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street distinctly left out the fact that the film is a musical.
  • The trailers for Wicked: Part I do include some of "Defying Gravity" in the background (much more so in the second full-length one/final trailer), but not any onscreen performances. The musical it’s based on is extremely successful, so it seems that this trope has become nearly ubiquitous in advertising, whether or not it makes sense to mislead the viewers of the trailer.note 
  • Wonka featured no songs in its trailers other than instrumentals of "Pure Imagination" and a hint of "The Oompa-Loompa Song", both present in the 1971 film adaptation of the novel it is a prequel to. Many fans were surprised to find that the film is a full-on musical like that movie was.

Western Animation 

  • This occurs In-Universe in the The Simpsons episode "All Singing, All Dancing". Homer rents a copy of Paint Your Wagon, believing that it’s a violent, action-packed Western movie. Much to his disgust, however, he learns that it’s a musical. This kicks off the episode's Clip Show plot in which Homer claims that he hates singing while the rest of the family show him that singing is a part of their lives.
  • In a rare non-movie example, the advertising for the SpongeBob SquarePants special "Atlantis SquarePantis" completely left out the fact that the special is musical. The songs in the actual episode are frequent and even plot-important at times.