Published Jun 21, 2026, 7:46 PM EDT
Music biopics have had a major resurgence in recent years. Just last year, audiences got the Bruce Springsteen biopic*** Deliver Me From Nowhere***. And this year, Michael became a breakout hit with the biggest biopic opening weekend ever recorded before going on to become the **highest-grossing music biopic of all time. **But the movie that is credited with kickstarting this new era of music biopics is now about to become a lot harder to find.
This film went on a historic run at the box office and grossed $911 million globally to claim the title of highest-grossing music biopic at the time, a record it held until Michael came along this year. The accolades didn’t stop at the box office either. At the 2019 Oscars, it won Best Actor, Best Film Editing, Best Sound Editing, and Best Sound Mixing, which was more than any other film that year. That movie is the Freddie Mercury biopic Bohemian Rhapsody. The Rami Malek-led film is set to leave Netflix on July 1. So, anyone who has spent the last few months catching Michael and Billie Eilish’s Hit Me Hard and Soft on the big screen owes it to themselves to go back to the film that started it all before it disappears from Netflix.
Your answers have pointed to one Oscar Best Picture winner above all others. This is the film that was made for the way your mind works.
You are drawn to films that operate on multiple levels simultaneously — that begin in one genre and quietly, brilliantly migrate into another. Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite is a film about class, desire, and the architecture of inequality that manages to be darkly funny, deeply suspenseful, and genuinely shocking across a single extraordinary running time. Your instinct is for cinema that hides its true intentions until the moment it’s ready to reveal them. Parasite is exactly that — a film that rewards close attention and punishes assumptions, right up to its devastating final image.
You want it all — and this film gives you all of it. The Daniels’ Everything Everywhere All at Once is one of the most maximalist films ever made: action comedy, multiverse sci-fi, family drama, existential crisis, and a genuinely earned emotional core that sneaks up on you amid the chaos. You are someone who responds to ambition, who doesn’t want cinema to choose between being entertaining and being meaningful. This film refuses that choice entirely. It is overwhelming by design, and its overwhelming nature is precisely the point — because the feeling of being crushed by infinite possibility is exactly what it’s about.
You are drawn to cinema on a grand scale — films that understand history not as a backdrop but as a force, and that place their characters inside that force and watch what happens. Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is a film about the terrifying gap between what we can do and what we should do, told with the full weight of one of the most consequential moments in human history behind it. You want your films to feel important without feeling self-important — to earn their ambition through sheer craft and the gravity of their subject. Oppenheimer does exactly that. It is enormous, complicated, and refuses easy comfort.
You are drawn to films that foreground their own construction — that make the how of the filmmaking part of the what it’s about. Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman, shot to appear as a single continuous take, is cinema examining itself through the cracked mirror of a fading actor’s ego. You respond to formal daring, to the feeling that a film is doing something that probably shouldn’t be possible. Michael Keaton’s performance and Emmanuel Lubezki’s restless camera create something genuinely unlike anything else — a film that is simultaneously about creativity, relevance, self-destruction, and the impossibility of ever truly knowing if your work means anything at all.
You are drawn to cinema that trusts silence, that refuses to explain itself, and that treats dread as a form of meaning. The Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men is a film about the arrival of a new kind of evil — implacable, arbitrary, and utterly indifferent to the moral frameworks we use to make sense of the world. It is one of the most formally controlled films ever made, and its controlled restraint is what makes it so terrifying. You want your films to haunt you, not comfort you. You are not interested in resolution if resolution would be dishonest. No Country for Old Men is honest in a way that most cinema never dares to be.
Despite its massive commercial and awards success, Bohemian Rhapsody was very polarizing upon release. General audiences obviously loved it because of the music and its near-perfect recreation of the 1985 Live Aid concert, and Malek was widely praised for capturing Freddie Mercury’s stage presence and mannerisms with striking precision. Critics, however, largely pushed back on the film’s handling of history. The movie depicts Queen breaking up over Mercury’s solo ambitions before reuniting for Live Aid, which is not what actually happened; Live Aid was simply one stop on their ongoing tour. It also shows Mercury receiving his AIDS diagnosis before Live Aid and channeling it into his performance, when in reality, he was not diagnosed until 1987. Song timelines were rearranged too, with “Fat Bottomed Girls” appearing far too early and “We Will Rock You” written and performed years ahead of when it actually happened.
The film also drew criticism for straightwashing Mercury’s sexuality in favor of a more easily digestible story. But as audience appetite for biopics has grown, those kinds of liberties have become an understood part of the genre. The same thing happened this year with Michael, which was criticized for showing a very sanitized version of Michael Jackson’s life. Whatever its flaws, *Bohemian Rhapsody *remains a landmark piece of mainstream cinema that helped put music biopics back on the map, and it is worth catching before it leaves Netflix.
*Bohemian Rhapsody *is available to stream on Netflix. Stay tuned to Collider for more updates.