How Nev­er Say Nev­er rev­o­lu­tionised (and ruined) the pop star doc

It’s been 10 years since Jon M Chu’s 3D doc­u­men­tary Nev­er Say Nev­er caught view­ers up on Justin Bieber’s rapid and extreme­ly online rise to star­dom. How exact­ly did this well-coiffed 16-year-old go from busk­ing in small-town Cana­da to sell­ing out Madi­son Square Gar­den? Chu’s film answered that ques­tion using what he called a ​“hyper­link” approach, con­nect­ing con­cert footage to scenes of Bieber’s per­son­al life. The for­mu­la was pret­ty straight­for­ward, rely­ing heav­i­ly on home video clips that evinced ear­ly musi­cal promise, staged ​‘can­did’ moments of him and his loved ones, and inter­views with just about every­one in his circle.

Nev­er Say Nev­er was pro­duced by the star’s team as a way to cap­i­talise on Bieber­ma­nia. (One ear­ly shop­ping mall appear­ance result­ed in five hos­pi­tal­i­sa­tions and an arrest.) It didn’t mat­ter that it had only been a year and nine months since the release of his debut sin­gle, or that he had yet to expe­ri­ence any real con­flict. (Bieber HQ assem­bled two fea­ture-length docs before he reached his low­est ebb, after which point it assem­bled a third.) What mat­tered was that he had fans who turned out in droves to spend a cou­ple of hours with him.

And turn out they did. Nev­er Say Nev­er became the high­est-gross­ing con­cert film of all time, rak­ing in almost $100 mil­lion world­wide. It was only a week after its release that Katy Per­ry began her Cal­i­for­nia Dreams Tour, dur­ing which time she filmed her own 3D doc­u­men­tary, Part of Me. Though its cen­tral con­flict, a divorce, made for a more emo­tion­al film, it stuck to the Bieber for­mu­la in that it made lit­tle effort to pre­tend that it wasn’t pan­der­ing to fans – as opposed to, say, crit­ics. The open­ing cred­its sequence to the next entry in the genre, One Direc­tion: This Is Us, seemed designed to encour­age in-the­atre scream­ing as each of the band’s five mem­bers were introduced.

In 2021, these films are still mak­ing big bucks. This is part­ly because they dou­ble as pro­mo­tion for the artists in ques­tion, gen­er­at­ing album and tick­et sales. But over the last decade, these films have migrat­ed away from the­atres and direct­ly into view­ers’ homes – first via pres­tige TV, then with the help of stream­ing giants. The likes of Net­flix have spent the last few years engaged in a fren­zied bid­ding war with rival plat­forms to secure the exclu­sive rights to var­i­ous pop star docs, in the hope that fans will sub­scribe to their ser­vice over the competition.

Beyoncé’s three-project deal with Net­flix was worth a report­ed $60 mil­lion; Apple TV+ paid Bil­lie Eil­ish $25 mil­lion for the forth­com­ing The World’s a Lit­tle Blur­ry; and Ama­zon Prime paid the same amount for an as-yet-unti­tled Rihan­na doc, also due out this year. Who knows how much Nic­ki Minaj, who’s already been the sub­ject of two fea­ture films, recent­ly made in her deal with HBO Max. Same goes for Demi Lova­to, whose Danc­ing with the Dev­il – her sec­ond YouTube-pro­duced film – hits the plat­form next month.

At the same time as these films appear to be reach­ing crit­i­cal mass, their recep­tion among non-fans has not real­ly improved since 2011, espe­cial­ly as the stars them­selves have run out of ways to dis­guise the fact that these are only not cash-grabs but exer­cis­es in brand con­trol. It’s telling that the best-received exam­ples – includ­ing but not lim­it­ed to Lady Gaga’s Five Foot Two, Beyoncé’s Home­com­ing and Tay­lor Swift’s Miss Amer­i­cana– large­ly devi­ate from the Bieber for­mu­la, or else are less bald-faced in their stage-managing.

Still, these excep­tions do not appear to have coerced stream­ing plat­forms away from the Bieber mod­el entire­ly: Eilish’s doc, as well as Netflix’s recent BLACK­PINK: Light Up the Sky, sug­gest that fan pow­er still out­weighs years active in the indus­try when it comes to com­mis­sion­ing such films.

And then there’s the small mat­ter of Shawn Mendes: In Won­der, which feels like a bizarre full-cir­cle moment in their his­to­ry. Mendes is anoth­er small-town Cana­di­an who broke through cov­er­ing oth­ers’ songs – this time on Vine, where he gained thou­sands of fol­low­ers after post­ing his ren­di­tion of Bieber’s ​‘As Long As You Love Me’. The clos­est thing the younger Canuck’s film has to a cen­tral con­flict is him stretch­ing his voice to its ​“break­ing point” mid-tour. That just so hap­pens to be the lone ordeal suf­fered by Bieber in Chu’s film.