12 pop culture moments that helped us survive 2020
By Shaun Stacy
Hamilton
Inspired by the 2004 biography Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow, Broadway saw the debut of Hamilton the musical stage performance in 2015. The play puts a contemporary spin on the life of the famous Founding Father, from an orphaned immigrant to work as the first Secretary of Treasury of the United States and finally to his own death at the hands of Aaron Burr. The star-studded original Broadway cast included Lin-Manuel Miranda, Daveed Diggs, Renee Elise Goldsberry, Leslie Odom Jr., Phillipa Soo, and Sydney James Harcourt.
A critical darling that swept the Tonys, a filmed version felt inevitable. Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures acquired the rights to the play and had originally planned to release a theatrical version in October of 2021. However, when the pandemic hit, they moved it up to July 3, 2020 and released it on it’s fledgling streaming platform, Disney+. On the weekend of its release, the Disney+ app was downloaded over 266,000 times and it was later reported that 37.1% of subscribers had watched the film over the course of its first month. It had been the most-watched straight-to-streaming title of 2020 until Wonder Woman 1984‘s debut on HBO Max.