One, two, three, four.

So may we start? So, may we start.

Hello, everybody, and thank you for joining us for a new episode of Next Best Theater, part of the Next Best Picture podcast.

I'm here as your semi-co-host, I guess we could say, for this episode, Cody.

Who else do I have on this call with me?

We have Dan Baer.

Hello, everybody. Nicole Ackman. I am so excited to be here with you guys.

Lauren LaMagna. Hello, hello. And Casey Lee Clark. Hello. Yeah, so we're here, of course, you know, three months into 2022 to do a little post-mortem about the musical onslaught that was 2021.

I think we can all agree.

And this is not, you know, an astounding revelation.

But 2021 was really a huge year for musical movies.

I think pretty easily the biggest we've had since probably like the heydays of the 50s and 60s.

It's pretty unprecedented in the amount of not only straight up musical adaptations we had, but also animated features and a huge amount of shows being filmed and put on streaming services.

And we thought it would be a good idea to kind of go back through the year and assess them. The reason we are doing this so far into

2022 is because one certain movie, which we will get to, decide not to release itself for most

of the country until, you know, the end of February. So we will get into that. But other than

that, we are here to explore 2021. Before we get into it, we're going to be discussing eight major movies of varying degrees of success. We wanted to give a shout out to four that we won't be covering because we wanted to keep this, you know, a manageable length. But we're not going to be covering the animated films this year that were musicals, which was Enkanto and Vivo. But, you know, congrats in Kanto on your Oscar probably. And congrats Vivo on, I don't know, I didn't see it. So whatever you are. Just congrats to Lynn in general. Yeah. He doesn't need that for us. He doesn't need that for us.

Another shout out to the two major Broadway productions,

which were filmed and put on streaming services this year,

and that's the Tony Success Come From Away and the Razzie success, Diana.

Look, they're both master. We love a balance.

Exactly. But, like, the fact that Diana is nominated for Razis is like, that's just embarrassing for the Razies. It's not a movie. Honestly, that's the thing is, like, when I got the Raz nominations, I was like, do we have to talk about it? And then I decided, you know, we don't have to listen to the Razies for anything in life. So, no, not today. I'm just saying to our listeners, if you would like at some point for us to do a commentary track on Diana the Musical, please let us know, get in touch. That is something that we have talked about potentially doing. But we don't know if anyone would want to, like, hear us, like, scream and cry over Diana in the musical whenever she says serves me right for marrying a Scorpio.

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