The ‘Greatest Showman’ Trailer Promises An Old-Fashioned Hollywood Musical

It may seem odd now, but in the golden age of Hollywood musical biopics were pretty common. Movies like Yankee Doodle Dandy used the thin veneer of fact used to justify a lot of great singing and dancing while recounting the lives of famous people, sort of. That’s never entirely gone away; any biopic of a musician is essentially a musical where people breaking out in song makes logical sense. Barnum, comes in. Nobody’s going to talk about Joice Heth in this movie, or that Barnum made a fortune from running the lottery, or his long, storied, and sometimes bizarre political career.