Webber started working on Love Never Dies as early as in 1990, but he didn't begin to compose the music until 2007.He was reluctant to call it a sequel at first, and regarded it as a stand-alone piece.

He later clarified that audiences would not need to have watched The Phantom of the Opera to understand Love Never Dies.

The story of the latter is loosely adapted from the 1999 novel The Phantom of Manhattan by Frederick Forsyth.

The story takes place about 10 years after The Phantom of the Opera, when the Phantom disappears from the Paris Opera House and becomes the mysterious impresario behind Mr Y's Phantasma, a popular circus and vaudeville theater on Coney Island.