“As soon as we got out of the cinema I wanted to go back in and watch it again,” says Charlie Bird, 13, when I ask him about the Queen biopic Bohemian Rhapsody. Instead, he and his 15 year-old sister Mariana – who also “loved” the film – had to make do with listening to the band on the car stereo as their mum drove them home.

Charlie, who lives in London, has liked Queen for a few years now. His favourite song is Another One Bites The Dust. But the film took his appreciation to a whole new level. And it taught him things about the band and its members that he had no idea about.

“I didn’t know much about the actual people, like Freddie Mercury. I didn’t know he died of Aids or anything. I mainly knew the music. It was good that they told the personal side to it,” Charlie says.

His experience has been repeated across the UK. While the film received middling reviews and was criticised for not portraying the full extent of Mercury’s colourful personal life and prodigious sexual appetite, its 12A rating appears to have encouraged teens into the cinema to discover Queen all for themselves.

A thread on parenting site Mumsnet about Bohemian Rhapsody is full of comments about teenage children – and some as young as 10 – adoring the film, with some parents reporting multiple viewings by their offspring. For the last two weekends the film has topped the box office chart, raking in more money than the rest of the top five films combined.

According to a 20thCentury Fox spokesman, 9% of Bohemian Rhapsody’s UK audience to date have been aged between 13 and 17. While this may not initially seem particularly high, it starts to feel significant when you consider that the events depicted in the film happened two lifetimes ago for a teenager today. It also deals, as Charlie suggests, with weighty and adult themes such as Aids, not classic teen fare. Online reports have suggested that the word-of-mouth success of Bohemian Rhapsody among the young demographic may have cannibalised sales of tickets to Disney’s Nutcracker and the Four Realms, which has performed disappointingly.

The 20thCentury Fox spokesman says the studio is delighted with how the film seems to be resonating with teens. However he claims that it was not deliberately targeted at this audience, rather that the script – sanctioned by the band’s remaining members – naturally fitted with a 12A rating. Whatever the path to its 12A tag, it is certainly leading to a surge in teenage Queen appreciation.

Take Henry Bramall, also 13 and from London. Henry (favourite song: Don’t Stop Me Now) loved how the film is a celebration of Queen’s music rather than a tract on “how sad [Mercury’s] life was”. “I wasn’t alive to see them so it was amazing for them to be able to recreate everything in the film,” he says.

Freddie Mercury and Brian May on stage

Henry has known Queen’s music for a while, often listening to it on the bus on the way to school, but since seeing Bohemian Rhapsody he’s been delving into the band’s back catalogue. “It has made me look more into their less well-known tracks and their albums as a whole instead of just their greatest hits,” he says. Friends who didn’t know much about Queen before the film are now quite big fans, he adds.

Helped by freshly interested fans like Henry, Queen are surging up the album charts. The film’s soundtrack is currently at number three, while The Platinum Collection of Queen’s greatest hits has entered the top 10. A second compilation, the plain old Greatest Hits album, has shot up from number 78 to number 23 while A Night At The Opera, the 1975 album that contains the song Bohemian Rhapsody, has re-entered the charts at number 55. Queen’s music is famously eclectic in style, ranging from hard rock to opera to vaudeville to piano balladry.

One of the attractions of their music, says Charlie Bird, is that it’s “something a bit different to everything else that’s out there”. Indeed, numerous teenagers I spoke to said that the scene showing Queen painstakingly build up the song Bohemian Rhapsody in the recording studio was their favourite one in the film. In the days of Pro Tools, Autotune and increasingly disposable or homogenous pop, it seems that old fashioned analogue recording techniques and the band’s broad musical palate are striking a chord with young people.

Remi Malek as Freddie in Bohemian Rhapsody credit: Handout

But the film has also become a pan-generational bonding experience. Greg Allon, a 48 year-old TV executive and himself a Queen fan as a young teen, saw the film with his wife and three children, aged 14, 13 and 11. It was the first time they’d all been to the cinema together “for years” and enjoyment wasn’t a forgone conclusion: one of his daughters is really into hip hop. “All five of us went. We all loved it – I mean, it’s a ridiculous film, just to be clear – but I forgive it everything for the set piece of Live Aid at the end. Each one of the kids, and they’re not always enthusiastic about our film choices, loved it. They were just like ‘that was brilliant’.”

The children were simply “blown away” by the Live Aid scene. “They didn’t appreciate what a legendary performance that was,” Allon says.

But watching Mercury win over Wembley Stadium on that hot summer’s day in 1985 is only one aspect of the film. His contraction of HIV, which led to his death from Aids in 1991, is another. For many teens, Bohemian Rhapsody marked the first time they’d really learnt about the disease. The film’s treatment of Mercury’s illness has attracted controversy, with some commentators decrying the film as an insulting cautionary tale showing Aids as a punishment for gay promiscuity. At the same time, the film glossed over many of the details of Mercury’s illness. However, despite this, it still shows a man coming to terms with the fact that he is going to die from Aids. And for many teens this was eye-opening.

Freddie Mercury on stage at Live Aid, 1985 credit: redferns

For Henry Bramall, it was educational. “I think it really revealed how little they actually knew about the disease and how new it really was as a discovery [in the 1980s],” he says. He liked the fact that the filmmakers “weren’t disrespectful” in their portrayal of the illness. Having seen the film he even looked into how research into Aids has progressed since the 1980s.

Allon says that his children “kind of know about that stuff”. But he said he and his wife informally and briefly addressed the issue before they went to see the film. “I wouldn’t say it was in a pointed ‘We must discuss this so we know what’s coming’ way, it was more a general overview of what Freddie Mercury’s story was. I think my son in particular became more aware of what Aids is,” he says.

The Mumsnet thread seems to agree that Bohemian Rhapsody’s light-touch approach to the subject has allowed conversations to be had that perhaps previously would not have happened. In substituting a warts-and-all approach for something more vague – in other words, in having a 12A certificate rather than a 15 or 18 – families and young teenagers are now talking about Aids, which has to be a good thing.

Is teens’ obsession with Bohemian Rhapsody likely to open the door to a flurry of other, sanitised biopics? Possibly. Studios will certainly try. But for biopics to work they need to contain original music and therefore must be endorsed by the musicians in question. While bands just may be willing to let their story be watered down by studios to ensure broad appeal in the cinema, fans will still want a gripping narrative.

A still from the Bohemian Rhapsody video credit: LMK Media

And this is where the problem lies. Imagine, for example, a watered down Fleetwood Mac biopic with all the grit, backstabbing and sex removed. It would be little more than an extended episode of Friends, and we’ve got Friends for that. Besides, do many bands have the strength of back catalogue that Queen have? The answer has to be no. Rocketman, the Elton John biopic directed by Dexter Fletcher who took over helming duties on Bohemian Rhapsody, is released next year. That film’s performance will prove whether the biopic is cinema’s hottest new genre or whether Bohemian Rhapsody was a one-off.

There are signs that the Queen film is building a lasting legacy in another area too. A few days after he’d seen it, Henry Bramall was asked by his drum teacher at school to pick a song to play. He chose We Will Rock You. Meanwhile Allon’s 11 year-old son Avi agreed to start guitar lessons two days after seeing Bohemian Rhapsody. “It’s not a coincidence,” says his father.

Parents and teachers beware. Expect school music rooms and bedrooms to echo to Queen songs long after the film disappears from cinemas.

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