The biggest casualty of The Phantom Of The Opera was Patrick Wilson’s movie-musical career

To write about Patrick Wilson is to write about his beauty. About his chiseled jawline. About his piercing eyes. About his gleaming smile. His is a handsome face that beckons you, that invites you to nakedly admire it. His “leading man” looks, so tailored to that well-sculpted image of Hollywood masculinity, have long been leveraged in miniseries like Angels In America, films like Little Children, and TV shows like Girls to create characters whose good looks are bashful reminders of their own fallibility. But truly, whenever we talk about Wilson, now perhaps best known for his starring roles in The Conjuring and Insidious horror franchises, we should also be talking about his voice. Wilson is a two-time Tony nominee (for The Full Monty and Oklahoma!), yet he’s only ever starred in one movie musical: The Phantom Of The Opera. 

The Phantom Of The Opera may well be the reason why filmgoers have since been denied a chance to see Wilson’s musical chops. Joel Schumacher’s much-maligned take on Andrew Lloyd Webber’s long-running musical about the ill-fated love triangle between a beautiful ingénue vocalist, her dashing childhood sweetheart, and a mysterious masked musician did little to persuade audiences and critics alike about the talent of its leading trio.

Let’s be clear: The Phantom Of The Opera is not a very good movie. It may not even be a good musical. But what it’s long been—on the stage, where, even after closing in 2023, it still holds the record for longest-running Broadway show, and in Schumacher’s ill-fated 2004 adaptation of it on screen—is pure spectacle. While fans and critics alike may quibble about its merits (let alone if it has any), the film version stands as a missed opportunity for making Wilson a big-screen musical star.

Wilson may now be known as a horror (and occasional TV) leading man, but he got his start on the stage. In the run-up to his Broadway debut in 2000, Wilson was amassing an enviable resumé. In 1995 he nabbed the understudy gig for the lead role of Chris Scott, the lovestruck Marine sergeant, in the national touring production of Miss Saigon. A year later he starred as Billy Bigelow, the carousel barker, in the Carousel national tour, only to open the Off-Broadway production of the rock-musical Bright Lights, Big City in 1999 as its central character, Jamie Conway. Those early roles proved Wilson was equally adept at leading old-fashioned sweeping musicals as well as more modern twists on the genre.

But it was his role as Jerry Lukowski (the Americanized version of Robert Carlyle’s Gaz) in the Broadway production of The Full Monty which finally let Broadway audiences see (and hear) Wilson’s musical talents. Even as the show, focused on a group of Buffalo steelworkers who decide to put on an amateur strip night to make some quick cash, clearly made good use of Wilson’s dashing good looks, it also proved to be a great showcase for his singing. Moreover, the show stressed the ways in which you couldn’t think of one without the other. Ben Brantley at the New York Times wrote that “Mr. Wilson gracefully plays straight man to the eccentricities of the others, and he sings with shimmering sincerity. (His voice seems to emanate from his gleaming white teeth.)”

When a Tony nomination followed (he lost to Nathan Lane in The Producers), Wilson was poised for plenty more stage success. Yet again nabbing a role in a classic Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, he played Curly, that all-American cowboy figure, in the 2002 Broadway revival of Oklahoma! that netted him another Tony nomination. When it was announced that Wilson was set to star as Raoul in Schumacher’s The Phantom Of The Opera—he was the first lead cast—it seemed like the culmination of years of hard work. It was a chance to bring his stage presence to the big screen.

Like the roles he’d been playing over the years, the Viscount Raoul de Chagny was a romantic lead whose swoon-worthy appeal comes from his sweet-natured goodness. Compared to the swaggering brio of the Phantom (played in the film, hilariously, by a pre-300 Gerard Butler), Raoul’s loving tenderness is much more demure. He’s a silken love interest whose light helps guide Christine (a teenaged Emmy Rossum) away from the entrancing ways of the masked figure who’d once so enthralled her. 

The gaudy, overdesigned affair that was The Phantom Of The Opera proved to be a critical and box office misfire. It barely grossed $50 million domestically. Owen Gleiberman at Entertainment Weekly best summed up the film, writing that it’d been directed as if “Schumacher were the world’s hardest-working upholstery salesman.” And drowning in this upholstery (and in prosthetics in the film’s prologue and epilogue) was Wilson’s all-too-earnest portrayal of Raoul. Looking ever the Disney prince (he may as well be a live-action version of the Beast in human form), Wilson’s poise and dulcet tones couldn’t shine from within a film that was created, as Nathan Rabin put it in his review at The A.V. Club, “with a maximum of eye-popping production design but a minimum of ingenuity.”

Wilson, of course, is not alone in failing to make a graceful leap from Broadway to Hollywood. Even as the turn of the century saw the movie-musical make a brief resurgence—best exemplified by the one-two-three punch of Hedwig And The Angry Inch, Moulin Rouge!, and Best Picture winner Chicago—those successes never laid the ground for the kind of crossover that would have made Wilson a movie star, even if Phantom hadn’t spectacularly flopped. 

Hugh Jackman, who’d similarly charmed audiences in 1998’s West End production of Oklahoma! (which Wilson would star in when it came to Broadway) and in 2002’s The Boy From Oz (for which he won a Tony)—and who’d been considered for the Phantom in Schumacher’s film—wouldn’t star in a movie musical for another decade. Instead, he became a household name by nabbing the role of Wolverine in Bryan Singer’s X-Men films and would only allow his singing and dancing chops to sneak out when hosting the Oscars in 2006, and later still in the role of Jean Valjean in 2012’s Les Misérables.

Maybe others aren’t as famished as I am for the kind of leading musical men that Jackman and Wilson can be (and have been in the past). But whenever I listen to Wilson’s many recordings—when I hear the heartfelt ache he can bring to a song and the way he can harness his tenor tones to conjure up emotional depths best found within a melody—I wish we could see more of it on the big screen, not just for Wilson but for other actors like him. This is not an ask to rebuke the stoic masculine figures that litter Hollywood blockbusters, but to find space for characters who are in tune with their feelings in the ways musicals literalize. The latest batch of movie musicals gives me hope that this is the direction that film is heading. What are Jonathan Bailey (Wicked), Colman Domingo (The Color Purple), and yes, even Timothée Chalamet (Wonka and, to an extent, A Complete Unknown) doing if not relishing in going big and keying into the emotional excess that musicals depend upon?

If another film musical has eluded Wilson (or, if he’s not really pursued them) solace can be found in knowing he’s at least found other ways to nurture his Broadway roots. In the last decade alone he’s played Sky Masterson in a concert performance of Guys And Dolls at Carnegie Hall (alongside a starry cast that included Nathan Lane, Megan Mullally, and Colman Domingo) and as Tommy Albright in a New York City Center production of Brigadoon opposite Kelli O’Hara. These performances are proof that, as Barbra Streisand, who recruited Wilson for Encore: Movie Partners Sing Broadway, her 2016 album of Broadway covers, put it, “Patrick Wilson is not only a movie star and a TV star. But he’s also an accomplished Broadway actor with a really amazing voice.” It’s a simple assessment, yet one which deservedly should be central to how audiences and critics alike come to understand Wilson’s career and on-screen persona—Schumacher’s The Phantom Of The Opera, notwithstanding.