Purple Rain is a 1984 American romantic rock musical drama film scored by and starring Prince in his acting debut.
[7] The film was supported with its soundtrack album of the same name, which featured two US chart-topping singles, "When Doves Cry" and "Let's Go Crazy", as well as the number-two hit "Purple Rain".
The soundtrack is certified 13× Platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and has sold over 25 million copies worldwide.
To escape his difficult home life, The Kid spends days rehearsing and nights performing at the First Avenue nightclub.
At the club, The Kid responds to the band's internal strife, the pressure to draw more crowds, and his strained private life with the uncomfortably personal "Darling Nikki".
Billy confronts The Kid, castigating him for bringing his personal life onto the stage and warning him that he is wasting his musical talent as his father did.
Frenzied after a night of torment, The Kid tears apart the basement to release his frustration, only to find a large box of his father's musical compositions.
The next morning, The Kid picks up a cassette tape of one of Wendy and Lisa's compositions, a rhythm track named "Slow Groove", and begins to compose.
Once on stage, The Kid announces that he will be playing "a song the girls in the band wrote", dedicated to his father, revealed to be "Purple Rain".
The Kid returns to the stage for two encores with the Revolution ("I Would Die 4 U" and "Baby I'm a Star") to the wild approval of the crowd and Morris.
After the success of his album 1999, Prince confronted his then-manager Robert Cavallo and told him he would not renew his contract with him unless he got to star in a studio film.
[9][12][13] Allegedly during the first meeting with Warner Bros., the studio executives asked Cavallo if John Travolta could replace Prince as the film's lead.
Her role was initially offered to Jennifer Beals (who turned it down because she wanted to concentrate on college) before going to Apollonia Kotero, who was then virtually unknown.
Music industry publicist Howard Bloom had advocated for the film to be released and said that "killing Purple Rain would be a sin against art!".
It is Prince's commercial peak, with total sales standing at 25 million copies worldwide, making it one of the best-selling albums of all time.
Other aspects of the music, especially its synthesis of electronic elements with organic instrumentation and full-band performances along with its consolidation of rock and R&B, were identified by critics as distinguishing, even experimental factors.
[24] The film was released on Blu-ray on July 24, 2007,[25] and was re-released on with a new remaster on October 4, 2016, as part of the Prince Movie Collection.
The website's critical consensus reads: "Purple Rain makes for undeniably uneven cinema, but it's held together by its star's singular charisma – not to mention a slew of classic songs.
"Prince saw fit to hide in plain sight behind celluloid and glamour", wrote Ben Philpott of Drowned in Sound.
And unlike most Hollywood films, where actors ranging from Leonardo DiCaprio to Woody Allen portray misogyny as heroic, Purple Rain dares to make it a sign of weakness and disintegration, rooted in trauma... Magnoli presents The Kid’s treatment of women as a denial of his feminine side.
While the Parade soundtrack album was a hit, initial critical reception of the film was largely negative with many thrown off by the completely different tone from Purple Rain.
He returned to narrative filmmaking with 1990's Graffiti Bridge, a direct sequel to Purple Rain which follows up on the rivalry between Morris Day and The Kid.
That same year, Prince purchased the house on Snelling Avenue in the Longfellow community that was used for exterior scenes of The Kid's family home in the original.
[54][55][56] In January 2024, it was announced that producer Orin Wolf would be adapting the film into a Broadway stage musical, with its book written by Brandon Jacobs-Jenkins, and directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz.