No matter how you felt about the quality of The Greatest Showman as a film, there's no denying that the soundtrack is incredible. Hugh Jackman, Zac Efron, Zendaya, Michelle Williams, Loren Allred (singing for Rebecca Ferguson) and Kaela Settle belted out the musical tunes of the circus-centric romance, but now the best-selling soundtrack is getting reimagined with some of the world's top recording artists. The Greatest Showman Reimagined will take the hit songs from the Hollywood musical and give them covers from the likes of Kelly Clarkson, Pink, Panic! at the Disco, Sara Bareilles, Pentatonix and more.
Kevin Weaver, president of Atlantic Records, explained the inception of the idea to Variety
"Last January or February, when we were doing 100,000 albums a week in the U.S. and it was number one in most of the territories of the world, I had a light bulb moment. We really realized we had something at the scale of what this was becoming, and we were quickly like, all right, do we want to do a deluxe version of the album for Mother's Day? What would that look like? Do we want to take the original cast album and add a couple covers to it, or add some additional demos? But it felt like it warranted something much more significant and robust. Then you had people like Pink and Selena Gomez and other artists who were on social media posting themselves dancing to and singing the songs. And that was part of kind of what went into my epiphany that we have something that's not only connecting with the masses, but it's connecting with artists."
The soundtrack will follow in the footsteps of The Hamilton Mixtape and The Nightmare Before Christmas soundtrack, which took songs from their respective productions and saw them covered by popular recording artists. Panic! at the Disco was even part of the latter and they're among the line-up for The Greatest Showman Reimagined (and they're the perfect group to cover "The Greatest Show"). Frontman Brendon Urie had this to say about how it all came together and how it almost didn't work
"Benj Pasek and Justin Paul are phenomenal writers. They sent that song over and said, 'We think you should sing this.' And I heard it and I was like, 'This sounds like a Panic! song. You guys did a Panic! song better than I've ever done a Panic! song. So I would love to.' I tried it, and then for whatever reason - labels, management, I'm not sure why - I got cut out of the process and it seemed like it wasn't going to happen. But finally I hooked back up with them and we got a demo version recorded and they mixed it and are putting it out. It's awesome."