The Phantom of the Opera (franchise)

The Phantom of the Opera traces back to the 1910 Gothic horror novel by French author Gaston Leroux, first serialized in the newspaper Le Gaulois before its release in book form. The novel is partly inspired by real events at the Paris Opera during the nineteenth century, along with an apocryphal tale about a former ballet pupil's skeleton used in an 1841 production. It has since been adapted repeatedly for stage and screen, most notably in a 1925 silent film starring Lon Chaney and in Andrew Lloyd Webber's 1986 musical, one of the most commercially successful works in theatre history. Across these adaptations the franchise centers on a disfigured, musically gifted figure who haunts the Paris Opera House and becomes obsessed with a young soprano.