Musicals have made their mark on American culture over the past couple of decades. Providing entertainment on the stage and on our screens. Today, audiences can experience a show in three different ways: live, movie adaptation, and now, a proshot. Though, many people might be wondering where this third format of the musical came from and why we haven’t been doing it all along.
The answer might surprise you.
A bit of history
A proshot is a high-quality, multi-camera video recording of a live theatrical stage production. It differs from movie adaptations significantly, as the production is typically changed slightly to fit the style of a traditional movie when adapting it for the screen. These changes can be anything from adding or removing songs to changing the order they appear in.
Movie adaptations of Broadway shows have been around since the early 20th century. They began as experimental segments. An excerpt here, a scene there. Most were plays until the late 1920s when talkies first hit the theaters. This new technology that allowed sound and picture to be recorded simultaneously created the perfect opportunity to bring the stage to the screen. Full-length movie adaptations of musicals quickly followed, becoming the mainstream option for stage-to-screen productions.
It’s widely considered that the first proshots of musicals were recorded in the 1950s, according to an article from Broadway World. They were for the niche television program and few and far between. It wasn’t until the 1980s that proshots were being filmed on the regular.
Even though sixty years had passed by then, proshots still weren’t quite at the point of taking off like movie adaptations did in the 1920s.
The rise in popularity
Hit modern musicals have taken mainstream media by storm, which has paved the way for the underdog format to take a place in the spotlight. In the 2010s, there was a spike in the number of proshots filmed for significant musicals, jumping from the 18 filmed in the 1990s, to the 39 filmed in the 2000s, then 71 filmed in the 2010s. So far in the 20s, there have been 29, and we’re only a little over halfway through the decade.
The question is, why has there been this significant an increase?
Hamilton, for example, made its debut on Broadway in 2015 and acquired a huge fan base through social media and its integration of modern music genre, hip hop, with the classic musical style. Five years later, a proshot of the musical debuted on streaming, reaching even wider audiences. That proshot then had a theatrical release in 2025 for its 10th anniversary and became the highest-grossing musical proshot in history.
Recently, Hadestown has surpassed that mark during its theatrical release at the end of July.
This popularity boost has to do with trends related to it going viral on social media and the accessibility of proshots, which are reaching a much wider audience and drawing in new fans. They can also be very similar to the original stage productions, and many fans say they like the proshots because they preserve that original art form. Another reason is their cost-effectiveness and much faster turnaround for production than movie adaptations, which can take lots of money and multiple years to develop.
Their future
Only time will tell, but due to the successes of the recent theatrical releases of proshots, it’s looking like they are rising to the level of movie adaptations. Hamilton and Hadestown have proved that. I imagine they’ll keep getting made since there’s a larger market for them now. Good news for all the theater lovers out there!
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