Robbie Williams’ Better Man: Are People Stupid?

Joseph P. Brandon, Grade 11 • May 28, 2026

Biopics

The ‘music biopic’ genre of film has never been as oversaturated as it has been in the past decade. Bohemian Rhapsody, A Complete Unknown, Elvis, Rocketman, One Love, etc., etc. This is not to insinuate that films should be devalued just for being music biopics, but how many times can the same “rise to fame, get a record deal, get wicked famous” story be told before they start to blend? In my eyes, it already has been.

Thus, the directors of today have had to resort to finding any way they can to make their movies stand out. For Weird Al, it was making his story a parody of biopics in general (Weird: The Al Yankovic Story). For Pharrell, it was telling his story as a LEGO guy documentary (Piece By Piece). Disregarding the fact that Robbie Williams’ story need be told in the first place, to call his heyday “over” would be a criminal understatement. That’s not an insult to him, but the need for a 2024 biopic about a 90s-00s British popstar is obsolete at the moment, to say the least. But for disgraced Take That member Robbie Williams, the only way to tell his story was by depicting himself under the guise of a computer-generated monkey. Is it undeniably a strange call? Absolutely, but I’d be a liar if I said it didn’t make it stand out.

He’s An Ape

When I first heard that there was a Robbie Williams biopic being made, my first thought was: “Who is Robbie Williams?”. I hadn’t really heard anything about him before, although I was familiar with him as a concept, mostly due to his name’s likeness to Robin Williams. The trailer just left me even more confused, thinking things like: “Is he a monkey?”, and “Why is he a monkey?”. He isn’t actually a monkey, though, as monkeys have tails, and movie ape Robert does not have a tail. When asked about why Robbie is portrayed as a chimp in the film, director Michael Gracey said the following:

“Quite often Rob will say, ‘I’m just like a performing monkey’ or ‘I’m up the back like a performing monkey’.”

“Williams takes up the story: “I was looking for some self-worth at the time and I was like, ‘I am a lion’. And he just cocked his head and went, ‘Mmmm.’”

“I went, ‘Monkey?’”

And just like that, we ended up with one of the more unconventional concepts for a biopic I’ve seen.

There is, however, the easy assumption to make is that the only reason he’s portrayed this way is because he didn’t want anyone else to play him. This is, in fact, not the case, as Jonno Davies provides the motion capture and voice performances for the lead role for most of the film; however, the vocal performances throughout are either re-recorded by Williams himself or taken from the original studio recordings of the songs. The film is a jukebox musical, a term I’ve only recently become familiar with, meaning that all of the songs performed in the film are already well known, as opposed to being written specifically for the film. However, the one that stands out the most – to me at least – is the sequence in which Williams and his band Take That perform the 2000 hit ‘Rock DJ’.

Rock DJ Scene

If there were such a thing as a “Best Scene” award at the Academy Awards, I believe that the ‘Rock DJ’ sequence of Better Man would have, and should have, won by an absolute landslide. This is an absolutely phenomenal scene in almost every aspect:

– Musically: The song is good on its own; however, Better Man’s rendition, featuring more orchestral elements and vocal harmonies, is even better.

– Technically: The scene is stylized to appear as though the whole thing was shot in one take (and some full segments of it actually were, including a breakdown that took 38 takes to get right, according to Michael Gracey). At the end of it, there is an extreme wide shot in which the viewer can see over 500 dancers doing a meticulously choreographed number along Regent Street in London.

– Choreography: In the sequence, there is a shot featured where characters perform a quick dance on top of gumballs spilling out from a machine, an idea that Michael Gracey had pitched twice before. Once in his 2011 adaptation of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang that never came to fruition, and once again in 2017’s The Greatest Showman. This is just a 5-second snippet of the scene as a whole, but I think it’s cool, so I’m writing about it.

– If you ever have 4 minutes of free time, I urge you to search up “Better Man Regent Street scene” and be absolutely blown away.

They Lost A Lot Of Dough

As much as I wish it wasn’t so, Better Man is one of the biggest flops in movie history, making only $22.5 million against an estimated budget of $198 million, losing a total of about $175.5 million. There are quite a few reasons for this; however, there is one glaring issue, and that’s that Robbie Williams was never really that successful outside of the United Kingdom, especially not in the United States. Strangely enough, this is a factor that led to Robbie being portrayed the way he is, with Michael Gracey being under the impression that the film might have resonated more with American audiences.

Another contributing factor is that the trailer horrifically misrepresents how and why Robbie is the way he is. The trailer starts with Robbie narrating, “This is my story, but I’m not going to tell it in an ordinary way … to be honest, I’ve always been a little less evolved”. This is the only justification we see in the lead-up to the movie, making it come across as more of a gimmick to make it stand out and to draw people in, as opposed to a genuine and conscious storytelling decision by everyone involved. And if it were just a gimmick, it would have been an incredibly costly one, as it features nearly 2,000 different VFX shots which took up a significant portion of the film’s budget, all of which were handled by Weta FX, the company behind Lord of the Rings’ Gollum, the Avatar movies, and the Planet of the Apes movies.

It’s Still Good Tho

Even for people who aren’t already into – or at the very least familiar with – any of the subjects at hand (monkeys, Robbie, biopics, music, etc etc), I’d make the daring call to say that Better Man might just be… an objectively good film??? Take me for example: I had never heard Robbie Williams’ music or even heard his name much, but I found the film to be an utter success not just as a Robbie Williams movie, but just as a movie in general. A sentiment I’ve heard echoed frequently from the Letterboxd and Rotten Tomatoes users of the world is that they simply didn’t expect such things from such a movie, but were glad to have experienced it. In some cases, Better Man is more of a commentary of the trials of balancing stardom with personal relationships more than it is the tale of one man in particular. But regrettably, a film can be this good but that never does matter at the end of the day if no-one knows who he is.

The Article Is Over Now

While Better Man deserved much, much more, and excels not just as a biopic, but as a regular motion picture, its box office failure can be attributed just to the fact that nobody really cared enough about the subject matter to go see it. So no, people as a whole are not stupid, but the people who write this film off immediately just because they don’t “vibe with the whole monkey thing” certainly are. I think that Better Man is an absolutely phenomenal film, one of the best of 2024 (although I’d more consider it a 2025 film as it only came out in theaters in late December). But then again, the best movies are often overlooked at the box office, like 2016’s Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping, one of my favorite movies, which regrettably lost $10 million at the box office. Even if you’re not keen to commit yourself to 2 hours of glorious monkey business, at the very least check out the Rock DJ sequence.