Sign O’ The Times Prince movie

Name: Sign O’ The Times
Director: Prince & Albert Magnoli
Genre: Music
Released: 1987-11-20
Cast: Prince

Palace Pictures

motion picture

Prince at his most dazzling

As long ago as 1982 Prince harboured ambition to make a concert movie. Looking to make a movie out of a show he had filmed on Controversy Tour, plans were put in place to create a movie around this show, which was to be titled The Second Coming. Those plans fell through when a larger project was developed into a semi-autobiographical fully-fledged motion picture, Purple Rain.

Owing to Prince’s growing popularity in Europe, his 1987 Sign O’ The Times Tour was a major success. However, the tour was plagued by persistent bad weather and saw many of its shows at outdoor venues cut short, and all its dates for Wembley Stadium cancelled. The resulting late minute notice rescheduling to indoor venues saw the UK and most of the Italy itinerary dropped completely. As the tour was neared its final date, Prince wanted to preserve it for posterity and the concept for Sign O’ The Times movie arose out of a last minute request by Prince to film it so that American audiences could witness this Europe only tour.

Largely comprised from concert footage captured over three shows Prince performed at the Sportpaleis Ahoy in Rotterdam, Netherlands on 26, 27 and 28 June 1987, extra footage was shot at the Sportpaleis, Antwerp on the 29th. Unhappy with the quality of footage from the Rotterdam shows, which was grainy and in the most part unusable, Prince spent the summer of 1987 shooting additional scenes, close-ups and other angles that the crew was logistically unable to get in the live shows.

The footage was spliced into what was left of the usable live show recordings, and a movie emerged with the incorporation of a plot – a love triangle between Cat, Prince and Greg Brooks – to develop it into a full-blown theatrical release. With the exception of Little Red Corvette, the movie’s tracks are entirely from Sign O’ The Times album. These extra scenes were filmed over 18-23 July in the soundstage of Prince’s newly completed Paisley Park Studios and featured 100 extras. Sign O’ The Times movie is the inaugurating project at Paisley Park ahead of its official opening that September. Prince and the band played a special concert for the extras after the filming – which became the first show performed at the facility.

The Paisley Park reshoots were done under the direction of Purple Rain director Albert Magnoli. The audio recording is from the soundboard of the Rotterdam shows, lip-synced with the original live footage captured under the joint direction of Prince and music video producer Daniel Kleinman. Sign O’ The Times movie is produced by Prince’s management team Robert Cavallo, Joseph Ruffalo and Steven Fargnoli, under the production credit Purple Films Company. When Prince fired his management in January 1989, Magnoli took on the unenviable role himself.

Owing to the poor box office of the previous year’s Under The Cherry Moon, Warner Brothers declined their option to distribute the Sign O’ The Times movie. Prince sold the rights to an independent label instead, bought by London based Palace Pictures whose top film credit to that date was Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead. Sign O’ The Times movie premiered at the American Theatre in Detroit on 29 October 1987, and from 20 November widened nationwide to 234 screens albeit limited to the Cineplex Odeon chain – nonetheless an amazing feat in scheduling given that the movie had been shot only four months previous. The movie’s domestic gross was exactly $3 million. With its $2.5 million production expense, Sign O’ The Times movie turned a profit to the tune of half million dollars.

Because U Got The Look was not performed in the tour’s regular setlist, the movie incorporates the promo video for U Got The Look shot at the Palais Omnisports in Paris on 15 June 1987 following the main concert that staged Sign O’ The Times Tour at the same venue, and coinciding with Shenna Easton being in Paris. It was directed by David Hogan and featured 20 dancers and 150 extras. The video is choreographed by Cat Glover whose work would win the 1988 MTV Music Video Award for best Stage Performance in a Video. U Got The Look also won Best Male Video.

Sign O’ The Times movie debuted on VHS home video on 5 May 1988, and its sales certified both Gold and Platinum by RIAA on 10 January 1989. Critics loved it, and to this day Sign O’ The Times movie is widely regarded as the greatest concert movie of all time.

Sign O’ The Times Limited Deluxe Edition

Palace Pictures folded in 1992. The rights to the Sign O’ The Times movie was subsequently acquired by the German home entertainment company, Turbine Media Group, who remastered the footage and audio. On 9 September 2019 the firm reissued the movie as a combined DVD and Blu-ray Limited Deluxe Edition. The set comprised four discs (2x Blu-Ray, 2x DVD each with identical content): Disc 1 contains the movie and disc 2 exclusively produced special features including an 102-minute documentary titled Prince: The Peach & Black Times, plus 180 minutes of extended interviews and an accompanying 36-page booklet. The DVD and Blu-ray versions contain the same content. Although available only to the German retail market, it sold out almost immediately. The artwork for this limited edition is by British illustrator Martin Homent, who in 2014 designed the official covers for Prince’s final two studio albums.

2025 IMAX presentation

From 29-31 August 2025, Sign O’ The Times movie received a limited screening in IMAX theatres worldwide. The release, done in partnership with Mercury Studios, FilmRise and the Prince Estate, is an upgrade to the original with restored visuals and and Dolby Atmos sound. The intention behind the IMAX presentation was to introduce Prince to new audiences, as Sign O’ The Times movie is widely recognised as a document of Prince at the peak of his career, as well as is noted for its influence on the concert film genre and for Prince’s impact on popular music culture. The original audio from the concert Prince staged at the Rotterdam Ahoy on 27 June 1987, the show’s opener Sign O’ The Times, was issued by the Prince Estate as a digital single on 29 August in support of the IMAX screenings.