After a surprisingly pleasant economics exam, some friends and I decided to go see Steven Spielberg’s new remake of West Side Story. Before watching the movie, I had read that it was poised to be extremely successful, with critics saying it was a vast improvement over the original film in terms of diverse casting. However, a few weeks after watching it, I read that West Side Story bombed at the box office, making $60 million against a budget of approximately $300 million. As a die-hard musicals fan, this was so sad—considering in 2017, La La Land was nominated and almost won Best Picture at the Academy Awards. What has happened to the state of musical movies since then? What will happen to West Side Story’s place in North American culture after this colossal disappointment?
Set in New York’s Upper West Side in the 1950s, West Side Story was the urban take on Romeo and Juliet, with the Montagues and Capulets replaced with the Puerto Rican Sharks and the Caucasian Jets, two warring gangs fighting for control of their neighbourhood as it is being torn down for redevelopment. Tony, a Jet trying to restart his life, falls in love with María, the daughter of the Sharks’ leader—and she falls for him too. What follows is a romp through their tumultuous (and eventually deadly) affair, filled with dance and song that has been baked into the lexicon of North American pop culture.
From a viewing experience, everything about the new West Side Story feels more real than the original. Gone are white actors with now-offensive brown face paint, playing the ethnically Puerto Rican Sharks, and in are a host of supremely talented Latinx actors and actresses. Rachel Zegler played, according to director Steven Spielberg, the greatest María he had ever witnessed. And I agree–she leapfrogged Natalie Wood’s vocal talent by a landslide. Another actress worth mentioning is Ariana DeBose, whose dance performance in the film as Anita is nothing short of awe-inspiring. The set and costume design reflect what New York City was like back when the movie was set (1957), maintaining a sense of place and realism that wasn’t captured by the original’s backlot-style production values.
That said, for all that was going for West Side Story, two major problems stood in the way of this movie exhilarating audiences like the original did.
First, the success of this movie was bogged down at least somewhat by Ansel Elgort, the 27 year-old actor famous for playing leading roles in the movies The Fault in our Stars and Baby Driver. Elgort played Tony in West Side Story. As the film was going into the press in June 2020, a woman accused Elgort of sexual assaulting her several years before in 2014, posting screenshots of text interactions with the actor. Though the allegations were not proven, this severely damaged Elgort’s reputation among Gen Z, who comprised a large portion of the movie’s target audience. With Elgort now cancelled by fans, the production lost a principal draw for a younger audience.
Another reason that West Side Story flopped may have just been poor timing. Spielberg first conceived of directing the movie in 2015, at the beginning of Donald Trump’s entry into US politics. Trump launched his campaign on a divisive platform of anti-immigrant policies, and to Spielberg at that time, it probably, as Owen Gleiberman wrote in Variety, “was something that [he] believed struck a timely chord.” Production finally began in July 2019 after a years-long talent search, but as the editing began, so did the COVID-19 pandemic.
Movie theatre closures forced the movie’s release to be delayed a year to 2021, but during this year-long delay, North Americans were forced to reckon with how they have dealt with different cultures over the years. Once the movie was finally released, after two years of Black Lives Matter and anti-vaccine protests that created so much discord within the population, many were asking themselves whether they needed to see the Sharks and the Jets duke it out onscreen at the movies when they could simply turn on their TV to the local news channel and watch a similar scenario.
All of this points to the fact that what was set to be perhaps one of Spielberg’s greatest achievements may have been a complete flop. I know—it’s sad for all the musical fans out there, but for now, just sit with this impressive, controversial, poorly timed flick. Perhaps in a few years, they’ll re-release it as a double feature at a drive-in theatre with the original movie. Then, everyone will be able to see how, as a purely cinematic experience, it truly is quite the show.
