Movies get made for many reasons, and turning a profit is an entirely legitimate one. The best films, though, tend to be driven by something deeper, an artistic vision that transcends the balance sheet. Then there’s the middle tier: competently executed, formulaic pictures engineered to capture box office and streaming revenue by following a proven template.
But a newer phenomenon deserves its own category: the music biopic. At its core, the modern music biopic isn’t really a film so much as a brand exercise. The movie itself is almost beside the point, a vehicle for leveraging an artist’s existing audience and then amplifying it. The true return on investment comes afterward, when renewed interest drives streams, catalog sales, and other ancillary revenue to new heights.
The big selling point of “Days of Our Lives,” the exhaustive two-hour BBC documentary on epic rock quartet Queen, is the material culled from the band’s very early days and their very last days. There are live performances from Smile, the group guitarist Brian May and drummer Roger Taylor formed before Queen, and some video of future singer Fredde Mercury singing “Big Spender.” The later footage, shot on the sets of the last music videos Mercury would perform, his body slowly but surely being ravaged by AIDS, are at once heart-warming and devastating. Mercury was positively gaunt, yet he gathered every ounce of will he could muster to go out fighting. 
