ABSTRACT
The sympathetic flashback story and the emphasis on youth all combine to create a much more mainstream love-triangle story in the film than on stage. It took eighteen years for Andrew Lloyd Webber's The Phantom of the Opera to make the journey from stage to screen. This chapter explores how the film reimagines the stage version in four significant ways. First, the Phantom's drastically different face renders him a potentially viable love interest for Christine, but eliminates the only justification for his evil deeds: that society would shun him. This change of the Phantom from horrifying creature to insecure loner led to three other changes: the complete erasure of all of the Phantom's magical unexplained powers and feats; the addition of a significant back story meant to create sympathy and justification for the Phantom's murders and isolation; and the steep lowering of the main characters' ages to render the story more of a youthful awakening than an adult love triangle.
