Here, Raoul actually defeats the Phantom in a swordfight, has him at his mercy, and then instantly lets him go when Christine asks him to (which, by the way, is totally inconsistent with his behavior throughout the rest of the story the real Raoul would at the very least have had to think about it first).

This is kind of a key plot point, as it sets up the final confrontation, with Raoul tracking the Phantom to his lair and…surprise, surprise…getting instantly captured and held hostage. In the stage musical, Raoul is completely helpless before the Phantom and is kind of kidding himself by trying to take him on physically. What was actually more damaging to the movie as a whole was Schumacher’s decision to make Raoul into a more ‘viable’ hero by giving him a bunch of impressive action sequences. This doesn’t actually do that much harm to the story, since the Phantom’s backstory was never directly relevant to the plot of the musical version, but I completely understand why fans of the franchise as a whole were infuriated by Schumacher’s presumption. The real issue is that Schumacher didn’t like the idea of his romance being about a fifty-year-old man in love with a twenty-year-old girl, so he made the Phantom younger and cut out all his elaborate backstory to make him merely a deformed, prodigiously talented outcast who took refuge in the opera house. Joel Schumacher had some completely invalid and frankly stupid objections to the original story, and as a result the movie’s Phantom had a completely new backstory.

Hardcore fans of the show were pretty outraged by this one, but they seem to be more angry about the implications involved in the changes than the actual final result.

The phantom of the opera 2004 showtimes