The now-beloved flop in which Christian Bale regrets being cast in the lead role

It's time for a quick history lesson! In 1899, there was a two-week newsboy strike in New York. The strikers demanded higher wages for newspaper publishers, who increased a share of sales in the afternoons and evenings, but ultimately earned little or nothing. Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst's newspapers were suspended during this time, and the strike ultimately succeeded/worked in favor of the newspaper publishers, although other demands had to be met by compromise.

The impact of the event was so encouraging that Disney created a movie musical, Newsies, inspired by the strike in 1992, with Kenny Ortega (“High School Musical” trilogy, “Hocus Pocus”) directing the project. New Christian Bale played strike leader Jack “Cowboy” Kellyand composer Alan Menken, who has scored nearly every Disney animated film you know and love, created 12 original songs for this now-beloved film. Despite these promising elements, the film did not perform well in theaters, as Newsies was unable to fully recoup its $15 million budget and became a box office flop that cost the House of Mouse millions of dollars. However, that didn't stop the film from eventually becoming a cult favorite and later being adapted into a Broadway classic.

To add insult to injury, The Razzies (which, by all accounts, shouldn't exist) won the Newsies Award for Worst Song of the Year around the same time Mencken and his close collaborator Howard Ashman won the Oscar for Best Song for Beauty and the Beast. I mean of course “Newsies” is not “West Side Story”but Mencken's score includes some timeless pieces and imbues the high-energy story with just the right adrenaline boost needed to support the theme of rebellion.

In addition, the failure of “Newsies” affected its new members. For example, it caused complex feelings for Bale, who regrets participating in a musical at such a tender age.

Bale's big break as a child was Steven Spielberg's war drama Empire of the Sun. in which he was only 13. Although this helped establish him, his first major project after Empire (as the lead) was Newsies, which was not only a commercial disaster, but no a critical darling by any stretch of the imagination. While most of its reviews praised Bale's ability to shine in a film that was otherwise considered weak by critics, the actor admitted Entertainment Weekly In 2007, he has mixed feelings about the musical:

“At 17, you want to be taken very seriously – you don't want to play a musical (…) Time healed those wounds. But it took a while.”

Part of Bale's complicated feelings about “Newsies” may have stemmed from the fact that the actor signed on before the musical numbers were added, since the film was not supposed to be a musical until Ortega was brought on board. Additionally, both Bale and David Moscow, who plays David Jacobs in the film, were not trained performers, adding to the anxiety of balancing the musical component with convincing performances that didn't betray that inexperience.

To make matters worse, filming Newsies was a constant struggle, thanks to behind-the-scenes factors that caused budget constraints, scripts that were constantly being rewritten, and the crew being forced to meet tight deadlines. In addition, death the legendary Howard Ashmanwho had to work on the score with Mencken cast a shadow of grief that continued. (Jack Feldman, whom Mencken had met at a musical theater workshop, eventually helped him with the songwriting process.)

Nevertheless, “Newsies” has a memorable legacy today, and its flaws don't stop it from being a pro-union anthem with a lasting core message.