Mötley Crüe released a trailer for their upcoming biopic The Dirt this morning, and as expected it touched on everything from Nikki Sixx’s heroin overdose to Vince Neil’s fatal car crash, Mick Mars’ battle with bone disease and Tommy Lee’s marriage to Heather Locklear. It’s unclear at this point if Pamela Anderson will make an appearance and how the film will handle the band’s tumultuous Nineties when their recording career tanked and Vince Neil was sacked in favor of John Corabi. And while It is highly unlikely that The Dirt will rack up Oscar nominations like Bohemian Rhapsody somehow did, it is likely to be a huge hit for Netlix.
The real Mötley Crüe went back into the studio to record new songs for the soundtrack, but don’t expect them to launch any sort of tour to promote the movie. Not only did they wrap up a farewell tour in 2015, but they signed a “cessation of touring” agreement before it began that supposedly legally prevents them from playing again. “The only loophole is if all four members agreed to break the contract,” Nixx Sixx told Rolling Stone in 2014. “There is no amount of money that would ever make me do it again. We’d have so much egg on our face.” (Here’s video of them playing “Kickstart My Heart” at the final show in Los Angeles.)
Nearly every band on a farewell tour says something like that while it’s actually happening, only to change their minds just a few years later when the money starts drying up or they simply get bored. And even though nobody has actually read the “cessation of touring” agreement, it seems like Mötley might actually honor it. There aren’t even tiny hints that they plan on touring again in any form, even if some sort of one-off performance around the release of the Netflix movie seems like a possibility.
They’re also willing to play again should they ever get inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. That seemed like an extremely remote possibility until very recently, but over the past few years the Hall has inducted Journey, Bon Jovi and Kiss, and Def Leppard are getting in next month. None of those acts come quite as close as Mötley Crüe to being labeled “Hair Metal” (even though Bon Jovi and Def Leppard detractors might disagree) and there’s almost nothing that rock’s critical establishment hated more than Hair Metal, but if the Hall of Fame takes just a single band from the Eighties Sunset Strip scene, it will be Mötley Crüe. Their music has aged much better than everything produced by their peers and the public can’t seem to get enough of their saga, which is why Netflix is unlikely to bankroll a movie about Winger, Dokken or Ratt anytime soon.