Bob Marley’s ‘One Love’: Forget the Multiverse, Say Hello to Hollywood’s New Musicverse

Pamela McClintock
·5 min read
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Paramount received the best Valentine’s Day gift any studio could hope for when Bob Marley: One Love, the biopic about the legendary Jamaican musician, set a new midweek record for the holiday when jamming to $14 million and besting the $11.5 million grossed by The Vow in 2012.

But Valentine’s Day turned out to be only a warm-up act as the film transformed into an all-audience box office sensation in another win for the music biopic boom sweeping Hollywood. Iconic music artists — of which there is no shortage — are providing studios with much-needed IP as tried and true genres, namely superhero movies, lose their singing powers. Barely a week goes by without a new major studio project being announced, including this week’s news that Sony and Sam Mendes are embarking on an ambitious magical mystery tour that will see each of the four Beatles get their own feature film, all to be released in theaters in 2027.

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Heading into the Valentine’s Day and Presidents Day corridor, One Love was tracking for a respectable six-day launch of $30 million. Instead, it grossed $51.5 million and earned an A Cinemascore from audiences in a rebuke of meh reviews.. And although it isn’t an apples-to-apples comparison, the Marley biopic ties with Bohemian Rhapsody to rank as the second-biggest launch for a music biopic behind Straight Outta Compton ($60.2 million).

The secret to One Love’s box office success: It broadened out each day in terms of demographics until it was playing to all age groups and, most notably, younger moviegoers who weren’t even born when the musician died in 1981. The Marley family worked closely with Paramount in making the film, with Bob Marley’s son, Ziggy, serving as producer. And in the months leading up to the movie’s opening, Paramount’s stealth marketing campaign included strategically inducing crowds gathered at sporting events, or even subway stations, to break out in song. Videos of the uplifting revelry went viral and singalongs started happening spontaneously at points around the globe (thank you TikTok).

“As an artist, Bob Marley has had such a massive impact across generations and there’s a reason why his music is still being played today. And when you’re able to rally around the music, the message and the person, there is always the chance to break out,” says Paramount president of marketing and distribution Marc Weinstock, who also worked on Paramount’s hit Elton John biopic Rocketman and the Michael Jackson posthumous concert documentary This Is It when he was at Sony.

It would be natural to expect One Love to skew older, which it did — at least initially. On Valentine’s Day, the largest segment of ticket buyers fell between ages 35 and 44 (22 percent), according to data shared with The Hollywood Reporter. And by PostTrack’s count, nearly 70 percent of the audience was 25 and older. But by the weekend, more teenagers and younger adults started showing up, despite the fact that there was a new superhero film on the marquee, Madame Web. Ultimately, those between the ages of 18 and 24 — the most frequent moviegoers — were the largest segment (23 percent) of the opening week audience.

“This is music that teenagers, parents and grandparents can come together over,” says Weinstock.

One Love drew an ethnically diverse crowd from the onset, but the makeup also changed as the days went on. Initially, 43 percent of ticket buyers were Black moviegoers, followed by Latino moviegoers (28 percent), Caucasian moviegoers (19 percent) and Asian/Other moviegoers (7 percent). The final weighted breakdown for the six-day openings shows that Caucasian moviegoers made up 38 percent of all ticket buyers, followed by Black moviegoers (30 percent), Latino moviegoers (25 percent) and Asian/Other moviegoers (7 percent).

One draw for music biopics for theaters in particular is “the bold immersive sound that modern movie theaters offer,” notes Comscore chief box office analyst Paul Dergarabedian.

The race to partake in the music biopic gold rush can be traced to Universal’s N.W.A. biopic Straight Outta Compton, which grossed $202.2 million at the worldwide box office in 2015, not adjusted for inflation. Three years later, 20th Century Fox’s Freddie Mercury biopic Bohemian Rhapsody stunned in earning $910 million globally. More recent wins include Rocketman ($196 million) and Warner Bros.’ Oscar contender Elvis ($288 million). But there have been misses, including last year’s Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance With Somebody ($59 million) and the 2021 Aretha Franklin biopic Respect ($32 million).

Studios are still betting big on landing in the winning column. Earlier this month, Paramount paid a reported $25 million for North American rights to Better Man, about the rise of celebrated singer-songwriter Robbie Williams. The film is directed by Michael Gracey, whose credits include The Greatest Showman. And Paramount and Amblin are partnering on a Bee Gees biopic that Ridley Scott is in talks to direct. There’s an Antoine Fuqua-directed Michael Jackson biopic now filming Lionsgate and Universal Pictures International, while Focus Features is set to release Amy Winehouse biopic Back to Black this spring.

When Paramount, the Marley family and director Reinaldo Marcus Green held the world premiere of One Love in Kingston, Jamaica, the crowd erupted into applause when Kingsley Ben-Adir, who plays Bob Marley, first spoke. While he isn’t Jamaican, his Patois accent was perfect.

“Authenticity was really the key to telling this story, and Ziggy and the Marley family were so instrumental in working alongside the filmmakers and our studio to ensure that we told this story in a way that does justice to Bob’s legacy,” says Weinstock.

Case in point: While other actors may have looked more like his father, Ziggy Marley wanted Ben-Adir because he embodied his father’s essence.

Concludes Weinstock, “When musical biopics speak authentically to audiences, they have an opportunity to become a part of the cultural conversation.”

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