You can be a lot less literal and more expressionistic on stage than you can in a film. Audiences are typically asked to make leaps like accepting a flat or a scrim as an entire room. Hell, Patrick Stewart played every character in A Christmas Carol without (AFAIK) any costume changes, just by altering his voice, movement, and posture. And audiences went with it. That's the magic of live theatre. Once you've done that, buying someone like Bradley Cooper as the Elephant Man isn't as big of stretch as it would be on screen.
I'm not saying that it couldn't be done, just that it would be a lot harder than you're saying. Theatre and film and two different mediums, and they carry different expectations. If you don't believe me, go see a live performance of something and then watch a film of that exact same performance and tell me which one you found more compelling.
First, let me say that I know what you're saying and you are not wrong. Commercial movies do have expectations on them, made by the paying public, that do not apply, necessarily, to Artistic "shorts" encountered at a Film Festival. Rarely shall the twain meet ... but not, necessarily, "never!"
For example, The Sci-Fi Classic: "Altered States," from decades ago. It was a commercial movie that presented some really intriguing, cerebral concepts, embedded in a Special Effects Extravaganza that was steeped in Art History and was fairly naked about it.
If you've not seen it, it's hard to capsulise the story, briefly, and not give too much away. Two young scientists are married with children. The wife worships her Husband ... he is the centre of her Universe. However, she has become a 2nd priority to him, because of one thing: He is on an Historic, scientific breakthrough. He believes that Human evolution encoded in our DNA can be tapped into by the conscious mind and interpreted in such a way as to be able to follow it, perhaps, even as far back as The Big Bang. "Why are we here?" "What is the meaning of Life?" All of those deep, philosophical questions are about to be Universally answered.
To do this, mind-altering drugs must be taken, so these experiments are kept a secret from The Scientific Community, until real discoveries are made. And through plentiful, surreal, Artsy special effects, the discovery this movie wants him to make is that it's an empty purse. The ONLY thing that says anything, the only thing that means anything ... is Love. But the Husband can't believe the answer's that simple, maybe. I don't know. So he pushes this experiment past the point of all reason ...
Some of these effects involve images straight out of da da-ism, like a Man-Goat with many eyes having been crucified. Even the climax of the movie involved highly stylised FX that seem to belong in a Space Warp, but take place in an ordinary Living Room, instead. The typical audience might not have been able to wrap its mind around all of this, and yet, the show succeeds because of its basic premise, as stated above. So, I believe that abstraction can work, that it has worked, before ... like PINK FLOYD'S THE WALL, or 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. But no, you don't want to run a franchise off of shooting movies that way. Modern-day, straight-forward comedies have, traditionally, always been very successful, for instance ...