10 Movies Based On Albums

The Weeknd, a.k.a. Abel Tesfaye, might have received a critical mauling in HBO’s pop star satire The Idol, but that hasn’t stopped him from trying to break through on the silver screen. Hurry Up Tomorrow will first premiere as a studio album before its cinematic adaptation, a thriller starring Barry Keoghan and Jenna Ortega, arrives in theaters in May. 

Of course, Hurry Up Tomorrow is far from the first LP to come accompanied by a feature-length picture: see everything from Prince’s Purple Rain and Tenacious D’s The Pick of Destiny to Jennifer Lopez’s This Is Me... Now: A Love Story and Halsey’s If I Can’t Have Love, I Want Power. And the likes of Lana Del Rey, Kanye West, and Bon Iver have all released short films in conjunction with certain musical releases. 

But there’s a far more exclusive club of movies that could only have been made once a record had been given enough spins. From art pop spectacles and gothic chillers to outlaw westerns and festive romances, here’s a look at 10 films that came about long after their source material hit the shelves.

1. Tommy (1975)
2. Sgt. Peppers’ Lonely Hearts Club Band (1978)
3. Quadrophenia (1979)
4. The Wall (1982)
5. Red Headed Stranger (1986)
6. Imaginaerum (2012)
7. God Help the Girl (2014)
8. Black Antenna (2018)
9. Christmas in Tahoe (2021)
10. Deliver Me From Nowhere (2025)

Tommy (1975)

With the help of maverick director Ken Russell, British rock icons The Who threw in everything but the kitchen sink on their adaptation of the 1969 album Tommy—just ask poor Ann-Margret, whose Oscar-nominated performance as the titular character’s mother involved immersing herself in a concoction of chocolate, foam detergent, and baked beans.

The rock opera also gave parts to everyone from Oliver Reed and Jack Nicholson to Tina Turner and Elton John, the latter in comically oversized Doc Martens (which were actually stilts). But it was The Who’s very own frontman Roger Daltrey who stole the show as the titular Tommy, a mute, blind, and deaf boy who transforms from pinball wizard to spiritual messiah. 

Sgt. Peppers’ Lonely Hearts Club Band (1978)

Following the phenomenal success of the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack, the Bee Gees’ Robin Gibb decided that he and his falsetto-voiced brothers would work with promoter Robert Stigwood to re-record The Beatles’ 1967 opus Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and release a movie featuring the music. “Kids today don't know the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper,” Gibbs told Playboy. “And when those who do see our film and hear us doing it, that will be the version they relate to and remember. Unfortunately, the Beatles will be secondary. You see, there is no such thing as the Beatles. They don’t exist as a band and never performed Sgt. Pepper live. When ours comes out, it will be, in effect, as if theirs never existed.” Of course, the reality was very different.

Starring Peter Frampton as a musician attempting to extend the legacy of his late bandleader grandfather Sgt. Pepper, the rock opera bombed not only with audiences and critics, but its own cast members and inspiration, too. Alice Cooper—just one of the countless rock star cameos—described the film as “blasphemous” to the Fab Four. And George Harrison, who decided against showing up to the premiere, brutally summarized that its key players had “damaged their images, their careers, and they didn’t need to do that.”

Quadrophenia (1979)

Having turned everything up to 11 for their first album-to-film venture, The Who got a more stripped-back treatment for their second. In fact, there aren’t any musical performances at all in first-time feature film director Franc Roddam’s gritty adaptation of 1973 LP Quadrophenia, an exploration of the distinctly British subculture known as mod. 

The band also don’t appear on screen—instead, Phil Daniels took center stage as a disaffected teen who escapes his humdrum life via a combination of scooter-riding, mindless violence, and copious amounts of amphetamines. Quadrophenia coincided perfectly with the mod movement’s late ’70s revival, and it was also a formative influence on the Britpop scene of the ’90s.  

The Wall (1982)

Once described by Roger Ebert as “one of the most horrifying musicals of all time,” The Wall is an unremittingly bleak blend of nihilistic live-action and surreal animation based on the same-named album, which spent a remarkable 15 weeks atop the Billboard 200 three years previously.

Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters wrote the screenplay, but leading man duties went to an outsider: Boomtown Rats frontman Bob Geldof played a disillusioned rock star driven to the depths of his despair by societal oppression. Alan Parker (The Commitments, Evita) took the director’s chair on a deeply troubled shoot—he later described it as “one of the most miserable experiences of his creative life”—which nevertheless picked up two BAFTAs and has since attained cult classic status. 

Red Headed Stranger (1986)

Willie Nelson was so determined to bring his 1975 album Red Headed Stranger to the big screen that he helped finance its movie adaptation himself. In fact, he used his own Austin ranch as the setting for its outlaw country tale. Whether it was a shrewd investment or not, however, is another thing. 

The film tells the story of an early-20th-century preacher played by Nelson who goes on the run after murdering both his wife and love rival. It got only a limited theatrical release, and the general critical consensus was lukewarm at best. But Nelson, who’d previously worked with director William D. Witliff on Honeysuckle Rose and Barbarosa, is obviously still proud of his labor of love: In 2019, he attended a special screening on the film’s grounds, which are called “Willieville.”

Imaginaerum (2012)

“The movie is about the joy of being alive and the beauty of the world,” Nightwish founder Tuomas Holopainen said about his symphonic metal outfit’s cinematic debut. Imaginaerum doesn’t exactly sound like a life-affirming watch on paper: It’s the story of a dementia-ridden musician who slips into both a coma and then a fantasy world in which he relives his orphaned past. It’s also likely impenetrable to anyone unfamiliar with the same-named 2011 album from the Finnish band, who pop up as themselves to perform several numbers. Still, director Stobe Harju certainly provides a feast for the eyes, building a sumptuous gothic world inspired by the works of David Lynch, Tim Burton, and Salvador Dalí.  

God Help the Girl (2014)

There’s always been a cinematic quality to Belle and Sebastian’s songwriting. So it wasn’t a huge stretch for frontman Stuart Murdoch to make the leap from whimsical indie-pop to whimsical drama. Nor was it a surprise that he used existing source material to do so. 

Written and directed by Murdoch, God Help the Girl was based on the same-named solo album he had released five years earlier that featured members of The Divine Comedy, Smoosh, and Those Dancing Days; it told the story of an anorexic teen who flees a psychiatric hospital to chase her musical dreams. American Gods star Emily Browning helped bring the troubled youngster to life in the film adaptation, which impressed Sundance jurors, who gave it a special jury award, but left most critics nonplussed—The Hollywood Reporter called it “an indie musical that feels like one long B-side.”

Black Antenna (2018)

Director Adam Mason took a novel approach to transforming Alice in Chains’ 2017 album Rainier Fog into an extraterrestrial sci-fi flick: Black Antenna—the tale of an alien father and daughter who travel across the West Coast attempting to communicate with their homeland—was initially released in 10 separate installments (one for each track on the album) before finally being shown as a 90-minute feature-length film. 

“There’s a lot of stuff in the album about the concept of hiding behind a mask, and not really knowing what you’re getting,” Mason said of the inspiration behind the project, which also took cues from Blade Runner, Starman, and Pinocchio. “There’s a lot of stuff going on in the world right now that I think fed into their album, and then by osmosis into our movie.”

Christmas in Tahoe (2021)

No one could accuse Train frontman Pat Monahan of lacking festive spirit. Six years after the band released their eighth album Christmas in Tahoe, the singer joined forces with the Hallmark Channel for a same-named adaptation which he not only executive produced but co-starred in, too.

Monahan plays leading lady Laura Osnes’s best friend Jackson in the film, which inevitably adheres to all the network’s usual tropes—big city girl returns home where she learns the true meaning of the holidays, etc. And alongside Kyle Selig, who plays a fictional rock star named Ryan, he also gets to belt out Train originals such as “Shake Up Christmas” in an attempt to save an annual yuletide show. “Maybe now I'll be in a Hallmark movie every year,” Monahan told People ahead of its premiere. Sadly, for fans of middle-of-the-road guitar pop and schmaltzy TV films, Christmas in Tahoe appears to have been a one-hit wonder.

Deliver Me From Nowhere (2025)

Feature-length documentaries about the making of a specific album are a dime a dozen: see Metallica’s Some Kind of Monster, Nick Cave’s One More Time with Feeling, Neil Young’s Harvest Time, and on and on. But the impending Deliver Me From Nowhere—based on the book by Warren Zanes about the making of Bruce Springsteen’s 1982 LP, Nebraska—is one of the few fictionalized films to be rooted in the process.

In stark contrast to the blockbuster that followed (Born in the USA), The Boss famously recorded Nebraska on a four-track cassette in his bedroom in New Jersey. The Bear’s Jeremy Allen White will portray New Jersey’s finest in Scott Cooper’s love letter about how he created the DIY classic, which remarkably was not initially intended for public consumption—Springsteen re-recorded the songs with the E Street Band, but felt that recording and mixing the tracks in the studio, he told Zanes, only “succeeded in making the whole thing worse.”

Discover More Entertainment Stories: