A flop as resounding as Hurry Up Tomorrow deserves a little interrogation, even if the masses wouldn’t watch the movie if it was playing in their own backyard. Born of a dizzying level of hubris and miscalculated self-appraisal, The Weeknd’s failed foray into feature film was released less than a month ago and already feels like it never existed, though you can certainly see the vision. However wrong-headed, the movie slots neatly into a long cinematic tradition of famous musicians taking a crack at big screen glory, a lineage that shares a curious amount of DNA across the canon. The stages may be different but the concerns remain the same; it would appear that, when you’re blessed with the voice of an angel, there are only so many viable outcomes. The system can’t help but bend toward deification.

Tomorrow’s original sin is believing this in a narrative sense, as it copies nearly every move witnessed in Purple Rain, Prince’s 1984 debut starring vehicle. Both posit their stars as troubled young men on the brink of destruction at their own hands, eagerly toying with an image and ego that’s been well-established across years of album releases and press cycles. Playing something so close to home makes business sense, presenting yourself in a new light without straying too far away from the audience’s previously conceived notions, but flirting with the uncanny valley is only worth the risk when the songs are up to the task. There are several entries in The Weeknd’s discography that could have risen to the moment, but his identically-named 2025 release isn’t one of them. Needless to say, the album that shares Purple Rain’s title passes this test with flying colors.

Going platinum 13 times over will afford you a little leeway, and director Albert Magnoli isn’t shy about putting a guitar in his protagonist’s hands whenever the plot mechanics start to creak. The musical sequences in Purple Rain are so rapturous and enveloping that everything else sort of slips to the wayside, including Prince’s performance. Floating on a sea of alluring glances and tossed-off line readings, the Minnesotan multi-instrumentalist isn’t asked to shoot for Oscars so much as encores, the film’s dramatic tension resolved on stage through a climatic 15-minutes that lay any lingering skepticism to rest. His character might simply be named ‘The Kid,’ but the alter ego doesn’t fool anyone. You can’t hide in the darkness when your aura emits a light all its own.

Whitney Houston moves a little further from her well-known persona in The Bodyguard, but this is truly a game of inches. Rachel Marron might not have the same ring as her legal name, but the world of R&B stardom depicted in the film is immediately recognizable, comprised of pampered excess, intricate choreography, and villainous onlookers. It may be higher concept than either Tomorrow or Rain, with the songstress engaging in a star-crossed love affair with Kevin Costner’s titular protector, but it’s only the husk that bears any heightened complexity. The dramaturgy therein is notably basic, neglecting to push Houston’s boundaries as an actor despite dutifully charting her character’s ongoing campaign for an Academy Award.

Moonstruck didn’t have to write any golden man plaudits into its screenplay, as Cher went on to snag the Best Actress trophy at the 1988 ceremony by sidestepping music altogether. Loretta Castorini can’t rock a microphone, but that doesn’t stop her from unwittingly communing with the cosmos, caught under the spell of a cartoonishly large moon as she falls in love with a one-handed Nicolas Cage. She’s hardly the only player whose romantic escapades feel powered by celestial forces, though the refusal to sing and dance marks her as an outlier in the genre, and undoubtedly led to her eventual shiny prize. Even when playing an ostensibly ‘normal person,’ these movies can’t help but imply that there’s something otherworldly going on in the center of the frame.

There might even be another galaxy involved, a notion made literal in director Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth, which sees an impossibly young David Bowie fall from the sky and then fall from grace. Driven to our planet by an all-consuming drought on his own, the extra-terrestrial, who goes by the intentionally anonymous moniker Thomas Jerome Newton, interacts with his surroundings at a chilly remove. The disaffected presentation is in keeping with the character, but it’s also indebted to Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust alter ego, proving that you can scrub some identifying factors from a recording artist as they make their way in front of a camera, but the blessed glow transmits beyond its initial medium.

Captivating allure can only lay still for so long before being repurposed as sexual energy, and beyond the ‘chosen one’ halo that all these performances share, their greatest connective tissue is the sensual magnetism they hold over supporting players. Earth allows its libido to run wild, the myriad trysts witnessed in the uncensored version accumulating to the point where needling provocation becomes the priority, but it’s Bowie’s presence that sets everyone’s loins on fire. Mary-Lou (Candy Clark), the hotel worker who becomes his doting paramore, is so taken that she gives it a whirl even after Thomas has revealed his true, cat-eyed form, her initial repulsion only lasting for a couple of scenes before things get hot and heavy all over again. The others might not be as drawn to Bowie’s pale, skeletal form, but the alien’s arrival in New Mexico functions as a subliminal siren, calling on everyone to start getting busy.

Others are a bit less democratic with their beguiling attributes, both Prince and Cher receiving the lion’s share of their films’ lusty stares. They turn Apollonia Kotero and Nicolas Cage into absolute puddles the moment they enter the room, with precious little courtship, or even dialogue, transpiring before the bedroom door is in need of closing. What first reads as hairbrained or underdeveloped writing is actually just straightforward and clarifying; we’re all flies to a light when people of this ilk come around. Houston only manages to buck the trend by inverting it, falling for Costner without proper romance as a prerequisite, but it stands to reason. That’s just how it went for Costner in the mid 90’s, and by the time those skinny jeans reappear once again, you start to understand how he must have been choosing his roles.

It certainly is a man’s world, and while we’re on the subject of gender dynamics, it’s worth noting how fascinated each of these film’s is with the imbalanced interplay between the fairer and lesser sexes. Had it come out today, Purple Rain would have certainly toned down its omnipresent subjugation of women, likely scrapping its period jokes and a regrettable sequence of a jilted lover being thrown into a dumpster, but the much-discussed physical abuse is too paramount to the story to be cleaved off cleanly. Maybe The Kid is just like his father, both resorting to violence when their partners draw out their rage, and while suggesting that assault is a learned behavior or hereditary defect is troubling at best, it’s not the only flick to suggest that toxic masculinity runs along bloodlines. 

When Cher steps out on her new fiancé to roll around with his younger brother, Jewison and screenwriter John Patrick Shanley twin the affront with her father’s infidelity, ultimately pardoning both transgressions. It takes a big person to find forgiveness, and Moonstruck has just that in Olympia Dukakis, whose steely, self-possessed turn earned the movie its second acting Oscar. She’s wonderful throughout, but it’s a scene with yet another womanizer, this time a college professor with entirely too much interest in his younger students, that likely snatched the statuette. The troupe is even revisited in Earth, with Rip Torn leveraging his position within academia into a slew of clothless nights with the pupils.

Chauvinism’s rewards can only be collected by about half of the population, but other vices are a bit more of an equal opportunity, chief among them being alcohol. Sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll might be a common phrase, but Tomorrow is the only flick in the bunch to fully indulge in the second category, with the other’s stopping at booze and calling it good. The immoderate liquor consumption feels like a capitulation, standing in for any number of substances the film studios would prefer to ignore, but that doesn’t make Bowie’s endless search for the bottom of the next bottle any more palatable. He’s the only one who becomes irrefutably addicted, but most of the poor decisions made in these things are witnessed by a slew of empties, neatly lined up in the background. 

All of that glass never melds together to form a window, and even if it did, the insular communities in each example would surely board up the premises. This is not to say that the surrounding family and friends are permissive so much as to observe just how closed off each performer is to the outside world, each narrative unfolding in a hyper-specific microcosm of society. Moonstruck’s is the most fully realized, its observation of a tightly-knit Italian immigrant coterie never once straining for credulity, or stepping out of its carefully crafted apparatus. That reluctance to escape intimate, known spaces is seen again in the largely vacant rooms in which Bodyguard and Earth spend the vast majority of their times, and while the 1980s Minneapolis funk scene seems too good to leave, you’d imagine The Kid might find a record deal sooner if he was willing to play bigger rooms. In an effort to position their centrifugal forces as the biggest fish around, these movies have a tendency to put them in some awfully small ponds.

Perhaps it’s the repetitive morass of their stations that has them all reaching toward the heavens, because the aforementioned saintly shimmer has to be coming from somewhere. This is, of course, quite literal in Bowie’s case, but Cher’s dalliance with our big white orb is enough to both give the film its title, and justify the actions of its characters. Prince might not be checking his astrological chart on the daily, but he does light enough candles to burn down a log cabin, and the hand puppet he inexplicably adorns midway through the picture manages to speak while its master’s lips remain still. The Bodyguard, once again, is the exception, but when you’ve got looks and pipes like Whitney, you don’t really need the great beyond to get through the day.

In fact, you don’t need much at all, not in the way of story, circumstance, or even event. All of the previously discussed commonalities relate most closely to musicians-turned-actors themselves, but this is a case of structure, and every filmmaker here opts for an open floor plan. There’s not much space for narrative propulsion or intrigue when the point of the exercise is to capitalize on the gravitas of your lead, which makes success and failure dependent on each subject’s charisma and clout. Hurry Up Tomorrow might be a misfire, but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t have worked with a different pop star in the frame. If The Weeknd could shred a six string like Prince, woo a stranger like Cher, communicate an elevated purpose like Bowie, or tug heartstrings like Whitney, he wouldn’t have to go down with the otherwise leaky ship. The others found ways to plug holes, and even if none are exactly Meryl Streep or Daniel Day-Lewis, their effervescence casts a potent spell.