Is ‘West Side Story’ truly a bomb?
And if so, what does that mean for the future of movies?
This weekend, my wife and I went to see Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story. I’m not going to write a formal review, mainly because that’s probably best handled by someone who knows the Broadway musical and the previous film adaptation better than I (I saw it once, about seven years ago). But before I get into what I want to talk about, here are my quick thoughts:
Steven Spielberg has long wanted to make a full-fledged musical, and I’ve long wanted to see him do that. As I saw another critic note this past week, even though he’s never made a musical, Spielberg’s among the most rhythmic and playful filmmakers. Even two of his weakest films, 1941 and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, contain dynamite musical numbers. Coupled with his love for classic cinema and sweeping emotions, it’s odd that we’re just now getting his first attempt at the genre.
And if there’s anything disappointing about West Side Story, it’s that he waited so long. I would love to know that there are two more decades of Spielberg musicals to come. The form fits him like a glove. In a year of great musicals, it feels like Spielberg waltzed into the room, looked at In the Heights, Dear Evan Hansen and Tick…tick…BOOM! and said, “that’s cute, but here’s how it’s done.”
I don’t jump on the bandwagon that Spielberg has been coasting in the last decade. While he’s had whiffs like Ready Player One, he’s also shifted gears to become one of the great storytellers of American history. I think Munich, Lincoln and Bridge of Spies are as good as anything he’s done, and if The Post feels just a tad unnecessary, that’s only because it feels like a prequel to the very best journalism film. Spielberg is just as dialed in and adept at visual storytelling as ever, and he makes it look so easy.
But with West Side Story, his filmmaking feels challenged and muscular in a way we haven’t seen in about 20 years. He adapts the play in a way that is intimate and passionate while also preserving its theatricality. Tony Kushner’s script doesn’t change the story so much as put the emphasis in different places, making it feel old-fashioned and modern at the same time. I’m sometimes put off by the coldness present in Spielberg’s collaborations with Janusz Kaminski, but here the cinematographer makes the colors pop off the screen; it feels like the best Technicolor movie never made. The cast — particularly Rachel Zegler as Maria, Ariana DeBose as Anita, and especially Michael Faist as Riff — tears into the music and lyrics with passion, so much that even Ansel Elgort, who I often find to be a sentient mound of pudding, is effective. This is great filmmaking; this is the best big-screen experience I’ve had all year.
I just wish more people shared it with me.
Is West Side Story a failure?
My wife and I saw West Side Story in the biggest theater, on the biggest screen, at our local multiplex. It was a Saturday matinee on a cold, blustery day; the perfect time to see a movie. And yet, our theater was only about a quarter full.
I don’t think we were alone. Film pundits have been writing about the apparent box office failure of West Side Story all weekend. The film took in only $10 million at the domestic box office, akin to what noted bomb Dear Evan Hansen made and what perceived failure In the Heights brought in on opening weekend (although the latter also had the benefit of debuting on HBO Max). As /Film puts it into context, Encanto, the second-highest grosser of the weekend, brought in about $9 million on 1,000 fewer screens.
Normally, I find box office performance to be the most boring story about film. After all, a film’s grosses don’t say anything about quality. Bringing in $10 million doesn’t mean that West Side Story isn’t good, just as In the Heights’ disappointing performance doesn’t erase the fact that I loved every minute I spent in the theater with it. Box office has never been equated with quality, and I resent the way we’ve turned a film’s receipts into more of a story than it should be.
But since the pandemic began, box office has helped gauge the health of the movie industry. West Side Story is a big movie made by the most commercially successful filmmaker of all time. He’s working with one of the most beloved musicals ever, and remaking a bona fide, Oscar-winning classic. Thanks to the success of Hamilton, musicals are in style again, priming this to be a giant success. The recent death of West Side Story lyricist Stephen Sondheim should have only garnered more attention. In a normal year, West Side Story would easily gross $100 million over its run; it might be lucky to get to half that if its current trajectory continues.
Again, that takes nothing away from the experience I had watching the film or says anything about the film’s quality. But, as we’ll get to, it does portend bleak things for the future of movies.
But maybe I’m wrong and maybe it’s too early to write off West Side Story. Musicals often open low but can have long legs; it wasn’t that long ago that The Greatest Showman was thought to bomb with an $8 million opening, only to hold on over the months and become a smash financial success (the thought of The Greatest Showman grossing more than West Side Story is incredibly grim). West Side Story’s appeal skews older, and this could very well be a film that older audience members and families flock to over the Christmas break. And if the film brings in award nominations, that could help it more. The story isn’t necessarily over yet.
But West Side Story is also facing down a mammoth-sized competitor this weekend, and the trends at the box office suggest that maybe Tony and Maria should have worn masks and tights.
The multiverse is all there is now
I booked our West Side Story tickets a few days prior to seeing it. When I pulled up my AMC Stubs A-List app, the theater had only sold a few tickets at that point. I wasn’t that surprised; a few days out, it probably would still have many tickets left.
While I was on the app, I decided to book my tickets for Spider-man: No Way Home, so my son and I could continue our Marvel opening-night tradition. The film was still more than a week away from opening, but the same theater had maybe five seats left. Spider-man was looking to sell out its opening night show more than a week before it opened.
Now, I can’t really compare Spider-man’s performance to West Side Story’s. One was a Saturday matinee, the other an opening night show. One film was a musical geared toward adults and the other the latest entry in a massive, multibillion dollar franchise. It’s not surprising that demand for the latest Marvel film is greater than that for a remake of a musical that released 50 years ago. But it does provide a somewhat bleak picture of the filmgoing world right now.
Since theaters reopened , the question has been: will people come back? Well, now it appears we have an answer: Yes…for certain movies.
Much has been made of a few big films that seemed to open to paltry numbers this year. In the Heights, as mentioned, was seen as a box office disappointment, as was the Sopranos prequel The Many Saints of Newark, and Will Smith’s King Richard. But those were mid-budget movies that were also released concurrently on HBO Max, which may have cannibalized their box office potential. But other movies of that size, including Ridley Scott’s The Last Duel and Edgar Wright’s Last Night in Soho, were original movies and theatrical exclusives, but they opened to a whimper. There have occasionally been original, mid-to-low-budget movies that made some money, notably The French Dispatch and The Green Knight. But they’ve simply made enough to be profitable on their low budgets (and the ultra-bonkers The Green Knight was never going to be a mainstream hit anyway); they haven’t taken the world by storm (the one outlier seems to be the M. Night Shyamalan thriller Old, which was made on a low budget and was one of the summer’s original success stories; yes, I know it was based on a graphic novel, but for all intents and purposes, people saw it because the brand was Shyamalan).
But what has been successful? Comic book movies and anything based on recognizable, highly popular intellectual property. Of the top 10 movies of 2021 so far, all but one are based on previously existing franchises (and the one outlier, Free Guy, definitely makes use of familiar IP). Three are Marvel movies, and that will likely jump to four after Spider-man: No Way Home debuts. You have to get all the way down to Encanto at #15 to find the one original movie.
And this isn’t new, nor is it directly related to the pandemic. In 2019, the last of the normal years, only two of the top 20 films (Us and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood…) were not either sequels and/or comic book adaptations. And you have to go all the way back to Avatar in 2009 to find an original film at the top of the box office for the year; even that’s a hiccup, as the last original film to be the year’s highest earner was Titanic back in 1997 (which is why you never bet against James Cameron). Sequels and franchises have long been Hollywood’s bread and butter, with crowds flocking to the familiar and studios more than happy to push out anything that had a famous brand attached to it.
And there was always some bit of tentpole logic to it, with the blockbusters propping up a studio slate of mid- and low-budget movies. Fox could fund an Independence Day in 1996 and also put out Courage Under Fire, That Thing You Do and The Great White Hype. Audiences would turn out for most of these, and the huge profits from ID4 (which was made on a fairly low budget) would cover the ones that didn’t hit, which still left enough left over for the execs to have a nice Christmas (I admit I am not a box office pundit nor a financial whiz, so I may be missing something). But what happens as the budgets increase and audiences only flock to the bigger films, getting their adult dramas from cable and streamers? As the costs for building cinematic universes rise and the stakes grow even higher, studios must focus only on the big stuff and shut out the smaller and more adult-oriented mid-tier dramas. Even Spielberg predicted that this would one day prevent him from making movies for the big screen, and would cause an implosion if one of these mega-budgeted blockbusters failed.
But they didn’t need a box office fiasco; they just needed a global pandemic.
Are people going back to the movies? Yes. But what they’re seeing is up for debate. By and large, it’s been the mega films that have been successful, with smaller films languishing. And the terms of success for these films aren’t what they used to be. Two years ago, a Marvel movie could be counted on to make $1 billion globally. This year’s top-grosser so far, Shang-Chi, has made $400 million globally; not a bad chunk of change, but nowhere near the $2.8 billion Avengers: Endgame made in 2019 (or, if you want to discount that as a mega-event, Spider-man: Far From Home, the number seven film of that year, made $1.7 billion worldwide). As studios consider what to release in the theaters and what to shuttle to streaming, it can only make sense to turn the theater into an amusement park, with only the biggest movies playing on the biggest screens (or, as Spielberg suggested years back, introducing a sliding scale where a modest indie costs $10 to see and the latest Marvel is $50).
And listen, I’m not anti-blockbuster. I like Shang-Chi and I’m looking forward to Spider-man. I’m legitimately glad that Dune performed well enough to earn a sequel. And I’ll always love a good roller coaster ride. And I’m not opposed to watching a movie on my TV if that’s the only place to see it. Most critics will fight for the theatrical experience, but you’d be surprised how many of them end up watching the best films of the year on laptops and TVs as they plow through year-end screeners.
Still, to think that we might be nearing the end of the days where I can enjoy the latest Steven Spielberg movie on a giant screen is sad, especially when something like West Side Story works so well on that screen. I’m okay with my adrenaline being pumped in a theater, but I like it just was much when I’m moved to tears, scared or elated, which doesn’t happen in Marvel movies but happens all the times in the best movies of the year. I still think that, when it hits right, the theatrical experience is the best way to see a movie. To watch a movie with no distractions with a crowd is more of than not the best way to see it, and to think that might fall by the wayside is deeply sad.
So, I’m crossing my fingers. I encourage you all to go see West Side Story if you feel safe in theaters and have a chance to see it. If you’re willing to spend three hours seeing Spider-man navigate the multiverse, you can spare two and a half to watch Spielberg bring one of the greatest musicals to life.