If you stroll down Broadway or the West End these days, you might think you’re in Hollywood. The names of movie stars pepper the marquees, and stage adaptations of hit movies have become commonplace. Sometimes it’s a natural fit: musicals such as The Lion King, Newsies and An American in Paris were each adapted seamlessly for the stage. But news that Peaky Blinders may be turned into a West End musical and Fever Pitch will soon hit the stage as an opera is harder to understand. It’s difficult to imagine Tommy Shelby singing a tune in between beatings and nightmares, or the football-loving hero of Fever Pitch breaking into an aria.

Turns out musicals based on non-musical films aren’t as rare as you’d think. At their best, musicals such as Sunset Boulevard, Kinky Boots and Spamalot shed new light on their iconic origin stories and expose the magic of theater to movie buffs who wouldn’t normally leave the cozy confines of cinema. But more often than not, it’s an expensive attempt to cash in on a successful product with little thought given to whether the story lends itself to the musical form. Theatergoers, it turns out, are a bit more discerning than those who pack multiplexes every weekend. With an average price of over $100, they deserve better than these colossal errors in the screen-to-stage genre.

Big

In 1996, when the musical adaptation of Penny Marshall’s Big premiered on Broadway, the New York Times panned it, writing: “In an uncertain world, Big operates on one certainty – audiences know the story and they like it.” A reliance on the audience’s pre-awareness may have been a novelty back then; today most of our pop culture is defined by it, which is surprising considering how badly Big turned out. The reviews weren’t uniformly awful, but the Broadway crowd, perhaps turning up their noses at an adaptation of a relatively lightweight film, just didn’t show up. The show was also criticized as corporate propaganda, as it brought on FAO Schwartz as a producer. With the legendary toy store closing its doors in 2015, we can now safely say that absolutely no one emerged from this disaster unscathed.

High Fidelity

If Rob, the hero of Nick Hornby’s book High Fidelity and Stephen Frears’s film adaptation, were to make one of his famous Top 5 lists about the worst screen-to-stage adaptations, he would have to point his incisive critical gaze squarely at himself. “Nothin’s great, and nothin’s new, but nothin’ has its worth,” he belts out in the opening song of this Broadway flop. The audience was not convinced of the latter part. The musical, which was criticized for its overreliance on obscene lyrics in a transparent attempt at edginess, was a side-one, track-one failure, closing in December 2006 after only 13 performances.

Carrie

If there was a how-to book for making musicals, here’s a rule that should go on page one: don’t open the second act with a song-and-dance number about pig slaughter. Carrie opened on Broadway in 1988 and quickly became the biggest money-loser of its time, costing investors $7m (admittedly chump change by today’s standards). It closed after 16 previews and five performances, giving it one of the shortest runs in Broadway history, although it performed better in a 2011 revival off Broadway, where the audience was more accepting of its campier elements. It turns out the older-skewing Broadway crowd wasn’t ready for a musical featuring a copious amount of pig blood that resembled, as one critic put it, “strawberry ice cream topping”.

The Fly

Adapting a movie into a stage musical may be common these days, but it takes special kind of madness to turn one into opera. Then again, the opera based on David Cronenberg’s The Fly was not without precedent. If Metamorphosis could work, why not The Fly? Quite a few reasons, as it turns out, not the least of which was that the adaptation just wasn’t particularly good. Despite pulling off some neat stunts – the lead actor literally crawls across the set ceiling at one point – The Fly wasn’t musically compelling. Veteran film composer Howard Shore’s score was called “curiously tame”, and the bad buzz from early performances quickly swatted this misguided opera back into non-existence.

Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark

Critics and investors expected Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark to open the door to a slew of superhero stage adaptations to match the recent trend in cinema. Instead, it became Broadway’s latest and greatest cautionary tale. With high-wire stunts and songs by Bono and The Edge, and with cultural fascination with comic book stories at an all-time high, how could it have failed so badly? It actually ran for three years, but high production costs (weekly budget of $1.3m) kept the show firmly in the red. In addition, it was dogged by reports of serious injuries to the cast and crew. One stunt double even required “unspecified amputations” after getting his foot stuck in a stage lift. Between this and The Fly, maybe it’s just time to stop making musicals based on films about men who turn into insects.