Music critic Terry Teachout salutes Tim Burton and Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd as "easily the most innovative movie of its kind to be made since Bob Fosse’s 1972 Cabaret" and "the best and most artistically serious film ever to be made from a Broadway musical." As Teachout points out, in the early days of al-singing, all-dancing Hollywood musicals, Hollywood routinely raided Broadway for songs and stars and even the titles of hit shows, but generally came up with their own stories for the movie versions; what worked on stage was understood to be different from what worked on screen. "In a Broadway musical, fictional characters sing and dance in everyday situations. On stage, this improbable convention is readily accepted by audiences, since the performers are physically present in the theater and can thus be seen to be 'real,' just as an actor who steps out of the onstage action of a play to address the audience directly does not thereby compromise our sense of his reality. For this reason, stage musicals need not be firmly based on a realistic plot and can make use of non-naturalistic 'presentational' techniques But the live-action sound film, consisting as it does of photographed movement, is essentially a realistic storytelling medium. . . These constraints necessarily caused golden-age film musicals to make use of conventionally naturalistic plots and, typically, to include fewer songs than did stage musicals of the same period. . . Moreover, the songs were far more likely to be performed in settings that 'explained' why the characters were performing them." The popularity of these kinds of movie musicals may have actually led to the development of stage musicals with more focus on dramtic narrative, such as Guys and Dolls, The King and I, and South Pacific, which Hollywood proceeded to transfer to film in rather faithful versions. "Although extremely popular with moviegoers, they were artistic failures: visually static, blandly cast, badly dubbed, far too long. . . and full of stage-specific devices that made little sense when transplanted to the screen."

By contrast, Burton's approach, which was arrived at working in close consultation with Sondheim, was to surgically remake the show in cinematic terms: "the dialogue is minimal, and most of it is accompanied by near-continuous orchestral underscoring so elaborate that the casual viewer might well come away recalling no spoken dialogue whatsoever. The paradoxical effect is to make the film, which contains less music than the stage version, seem even more operatic. No less flamboyantly operatic are the sets, which can best be described as a Gothic caricature of Victorian London, and the film’s grim palette, in which the only bright color is the spurting red blood of the victims whose throats the revenge-crazed Sweeney slashes with his razor." The necessary adjustment is embodied in Johnny Depp, whose performance, with its "cold, hard, shockingly intense reserve", is of a piece with his singing of the title role, which would be inadequate to the demands of a live concert hall but in the context of the movie helps set the intimate connection Burton sought to establish between the people on screen and the audience, to capture what the producer Richard Zanuck calls the effect of "people singing in a room." "The result," Teachout writes, "is a movie that to a considerable degree succeeds in fusing the seemingly incompatible virtues of the golden-age film musical and the postmodern stage musical."