Julie Taymor's Across the Universe (2007) presents an array of hits spanning the Beatles’ relatively brief career, loosely tying together the ‘boy meets girl, girl meets [radical activist], boy gets girl back’ plot commonly associated with the musical. Unlike previous musicals however, Taymor's focus on the film's thirty-three musical sequences that make up the linear narrative emphasises Across the Universe's ‘hybrid of long-form music video and movie musical’ that highlights the resonance of the Beatles’ lyrics to contemporary audiences. Because the Beatles’ canon is so well established within popular music culture and the band's music studied in great detail by scholars, arguably any visual representation of those well-known songs would need to offer a coherent narrative based on one possible interpretation while still allowing space for the audience to project their own, often personal meanings onto those songs. With songs so familiar, it becomes a difficult undertaking to offer a new and challenging film musical that does not recycle the same formulaic structure, while still attempting to appeal to a mainstream cinema-going audience. In regards to these issues, the film's innovation then is to eschew the classic film musical formula of using the music sequence to address and counter the moments within the film's narrative where disruptions or problems are presented.

For Taymor, it was important not to create a film that ‘[regurgitated] the same old, same old’ in order to contribute a piece of art that would enable the audience to ‘grow as a culture’. However, in a recent interview with Jodie Foster at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York, Taymor recalled how the production company Revolution Studios not only tried to have the film cut to a more audience friendly length, but also kept trying to influence changes to make the film more like Kenny Ortega's High School Musical (2006). In Taymor's words, she was pressured to ‘get rid of the black people, the lesbians, the politics, the Vietnam war […]’. By being uncompromising in her artistic vision, Taymor delivers a musical, partly influenced by the aesthetical approaches of 1950s integrated musicals where moments of dance and song merge into non-musical sequences, to challenge audiences rather than retread mainstream musical ground ensuring that Across the Universe is ‘unlike Hairspray, or Dreamgirls, or Chicago’ in terms of narrative presentation and unrealistic moments of breaking out into song.