by Michelle Alexander

Created on: August 12, 2008

Like many others, I was over come with joy when I first heard that Phantom of the Opera was going to be turned into a movie. Ever since Chicago won the best picture Oscar not to mention a gross of over $300,000,000 a new wave of film was revived: the movie musical. I can't exactly say why movie studios stopped making movie musical except to say that they lost the audience draw, mainly the male audience. It could be because Chicago dealt with sex and murder, or because more males felt comfortable defining themselves as "metro sexual", but this one movie ushered the way for other studios to produce a class of movies not seen since the 1960s.

I have seen the Phantom of the Opera stage productions in both Toronto and Detroit, and have been a fan ever since. I saw the movie on Christmas day, and I was quite pleased. I understand the challenges of bringing a musical to the screen. Some of the effects that can only be appreciated live on stage where altered for the movie, such as the fire ball scene that was changed into a good old fashion sword fight and the classic dropping of the chandler that was moved from the scene before intermission to the end of movie finale. Emmy Rossom was beautifully cast as Christine, and Patrick Wilson was perfectly cast as Raul. Both had amazing voices and worked very well together on screen. I left the theater with only one, yet very obvious complaint: how did Gerard Butler get cast as the Phantom? In the end the movie only grossed $51,000,000 (still impressive, but lacking the audience draw of most other movie musicals) and every review I read ranked some where between "I didn't like it" and "this was god offal." What happened? How could a musical that's been successfully running for over twenty years and a movie with so much promise not connect with audiences?

Even with it's faults I still love this movie, but one of the reasons I believe that this movie fell short was casting of Gerard Butler. I have this movie on DVD and I have watched it several times. Upon repeat viewing, I have a greater understanding of why he was cast. The Phantom needs to have a very distinctive, almost harsh sounding voice. The simply beautiful voice belongs to Raul. The Phantom is basically a rock star with a great range. Gerard Butler almost pulled it off but his Scottish accent that gave his voice it's distinctiveness may have done it's job a bit too well. To me, it sounded like his was tripping over it, probably because we are all used to hearing The Phantom

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