It stars Rami Malek as Mercury, with Lucy Boynton, Gwilym Lee, Ben Hardy, Joe Mazzello, Aidan Gillen, Tom Hollander, and Mike Myers in supporting roles.

Singer served as director through most of principal photography, which began in London in September 2017, but was fired in December 2017 due to frequent absences and clashes with the cast and crew.

While the musical sequences and Malek's performance were particularly praised,[8] Singer's direction, the film's portrayal of Mercury and other personnel,[9][10] and its use of creative licence[11][12] were criticized.

He finds drummer Roger Taylor and guitarist Brian May and learns that their lead singer and bassist, Tim Staffell, has just quit to join Humpy Bong.

The band's success continues into the early 1980s with the songs "We Will Rock You" and "Another One Bites the Dust", but tensions arise over Paul's influence on Freddie.

He records his 1984 solo album Mr. Bad Guy in Munich and engages in drugs and gay orgies with Paul, but starts to feel unwell.

He learns that he has AIDS and reveals his condition to the band, but brushes off their sympathy, and requests that it be kept concealed from the public, wishing to perform and make music for however long he has left.

Covering the period up to Live Aid in 1985, the film was to feature Sacha Baron Cohen as Freddie Mercury, with Graham King to co-produce, and Peter Morgan to write the screenplay.

Comments by May and Roger Taylor suggested that Baron Cohen was too well known as a comedian and prankster (due largely to his fictional personae Ali G and Borat), and that his presence in the film would be distracting.

[28] In March 2016, Baron Cohen spoke about misunderstandings with Queen about the subject and events of the film, in particular, whether the story ought to continue past Mercury's 1991 death.

He also mentioned artistic disagreements with the band over the composition of the production team, referring specifically to Cohen recruiting Morgan, David Fincher, and Tom Hooper.

A year later, Bryan Singer was in talks to take over as director, Rami Malek was cast as Mercury, and the film was fast-tracked by 20th Century Fox and New Regency.

The album contains several Queen hits and 11 previously unreleased recordings, including five tracks from their 21-minute Live Aid performance in July 1985, which have never before been released in audio form.

However, Neela Ghoshal of Human Rights Watch stated that the country deserved "an Oscar for hypocrisy" given its prohibition on homosexuals appearing in the media.

[92] Television writer and producer Bryan Fuller criticized the trailer for focusing on Mercury's relationship with women as opposed to men, and also highlighted the absence of the singer's AIDS diagnosis from the synopsis.

[93] With the release of the trailer, Queen reached three of the top 20 positions on the Billboard Hot Rock Songs chart: "Bohemian Rhapsody", "Another One Bites the Dust" and "We Are the Champions".

[95] However, in November 2021, after McCarten sued producer Graham King over lack of payments, it was revealed 20th Century Fox wrote down the film as a $51 million loss, an act attributed to Hollywood accounting.

[107] In the United States and Canada, Bohemian Rhapsody was released alongside The Nutcracker and the Four Realms and Nobody's Fool, and was originally projected to gross $26–30 million in its opening weekend.

[112] On 1 December, it passed $162 million at the domestic box office, surpassing Straight Outta Compton as the highest grossing musical biopic in the United States.

[115] In the film's 13th week of release, following the announcement of its five Oscar nominations, it was added back to an additional 246 theatres (for a total of 1,423) and made $2.6 million.

[133][134][135] Owen Gleiberman of Variety wrote: "Rami Malek does a commanding job of channeling Freddie Mercury's flamboyant rock-god bravura, but Bryan Singer's middle-of-the-road Queen biopic rarely lives up to the authenticity of its lead performance.

"[136] Paul Whitington, writing for the Irish Independent, gave the film 3/5 stars, saying: "Bohemian Rhapsody is not big on subtlety: it tells Freddie's story loudly, taking dramatic shortcuts, over-neatly conflating events and reducing most of the surrounding characters to single dimensions.

Yet if it has many of the problems we associate with 'bad' movies, it has more ragged energy than so many good ones, largely because of Rami Malek's performance as Mercury, all glitter and muscle and nerve endings."

"[142] For The Spectator, Jasper Rees described Bohemian Rhapsody as "a succession of predigested clichés", writing "you are overcome by the sapping impression that almost nothing happened the way it's being presented."

"[144] Peter Travers of Rolling Stone wrote: "In struggling to make a salable PG-13 movie out of an R-rated rock life, Bohemian Rhapsody leaves you feeling that something essential and elemental is missing", but said to put Malek "high on the list for best film performances of 2018," as the actor "digs so deep into the role that we can't believe we're not watching the real thing.

"[145] Dave Calhoun wrote for Time Out: "It boasts a film-stealing, possessed performance by Rami Malek, who pouts, struts and quips as Mercury, turning the rest of the cast into bit-part players...

He added, "don't expect anything more than a safe gloss over the Queen tale... its attitude toward sex and drugs is coy and uncomfortably close to the small-world thinking it claims to dismiss.

Aja Romano wrote for Vox: "Bohemian Rhapsody is a movie that consciously tries to position a gay man at its center while strategically disengaging with the 'gay' part as much as it can, flitting briefly over his emotional and sexual experiences and fixating on his platonic relationship with an ex-girlfriend instead.

Editor John Ottman, aware of these lapses, explained that they were the result of mixing scenes that had been shot by Singer and Fletcher, as well as in response to the producers' notes and test audience feedback, wishing that he could have handled them differently.

[164][165] In August 2021, guitarist Brian May revealed that there were ideas being thrown around for a sequel to Bohemian Rhapsody, though it would be a matter of topping the original and could possibly take years to get the screenplay right.