The 25 best film musicals of all time – ranking

They're dead forever! Wait, they're back to life. No, dead again. And suddenly it's a golden age. No other genre – not even Westerns – has gone through as many rounds of extinction and then resurrection as the movie musical.

They became a staple of Hollywood entertainment as soon as The Jazz Singer (1927) ushered in the era of talkies, but were considered obsolete by the late 1940s when production declined sharply. Even Disney turned away from the format in the 1950s before all studios benefited from an explosive renaissance in the 1960s, leading to a chaotic oversupply and an equally abrupt end.

Lately, we've witnessed a strange, if not atypical, streak of success for the genre, with some of the biggest hits – Les Misérables (2012), The Greatest Showman (2017), the remakes of Beauty and the Beast (2017) and The Lion King (2019), and Bohemian Rhapsody (2018) – managing to extend the musical's shelf life despite being not at all well-received by critics.

None of these films are anywhere near good enough to make our all-time top 25. Some of Disney's more recent successes, such as Frozen (2013) or Moana (2016), may be conspicuous by their absence – these are on our Disney list instead.

We haven't limited ourselves to Hollywood (there are four outliers), but we haven't gone too far either: it's easy to imagine an alternative list of the 25 weirdest musicals that would honor, for example, Dancer in the Dark (2000), The Wayward Cloud (2005), and Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001). Still, not every traditional classic is guaranteed a place in this hall of fame.

25. My Fair Lady (George Cukor, 1964)

Let's face it, Rex Harrison's Henry Higgins is a pompous ass, and the film would probably be better with a leading lady who could sing. Whether Julie Andrews, who played Eliza on stage, could have matched Audrey Hepburn's girlish insouciance in I Could Have Danced All Night (as she was dubbed by Marni Nixon) is another question. Cukor's layered Edwardian trifle is a smash hit and winner of the Best Picture award. Cecil Beaton's hats are the icing on the cake.