The Disney+ release of West Side Story is reviving interest in Steven Spielberg's masterpiece ahead of Oscar voting... but is it saving the film?
A funny thing happened on the way to Oscar-voting season: The Internet discovered Steven Spielberg made a West Side Story movie.
Pardon the glare, but it certainly felt like this during the past week when movie Twitter was flooded with stunned reactions to a certain tweet, revealing just a snippet of the lively cinematic remake of Spielberg's Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim musical Was. A lonely, mind-numbingly complex Dolly and Crane (or Drone?) shot in the clip follows a group of characters, including Maria (Rachel Ziegler) and Anita (Ariana DeBos), as they prepare to participate in a dance. to enter the school's gymnasium. Within that single shot, the camera weaves and pirouettes, flying and pouncing on the dance floor, all while giving the viewer the maximum density of information.
As Guillermo del Toro marveled on Twitter, "[Spielberg] did the camera dance." As a connoisseur of cinema and an autobiographer, del Toro certainly had already seen and studied the startling accuracy of Spielberg's earlier musicals. But he wanted to take the opportunity to spread the good word even after another Twitter user posted the clip. This is the one below by Shane Anderson, who states more simply, "This shot from West Side Story is insane."
This shot from WEST SIDE STORY is fucking insane. pic.twitter.com/krmqHHklRr
— Shane Anderson 🏳️🌈 (@ShaneM_Anderson) February 26, 2022
Yes it is, and yes it should be celebrated. But with the way the clip went viral, and with so many thousands of people stunned by Janusz Kaminski's cinematography, it became clear that many—most of them—ever shot that shot or another from Spielberg's West Side Story. had not seen. And these are the people who spend parts of their weekend tweeting about movies!
This fact comes a week before Academy Awards voters begin turning in their final ballots, Disney's cleverness to revive interest in the film again and the modest tragedy of a film as West Side Story still about to lose at the box office. .
Despite initial skepticism toward Spielberg's remake of one of film history's greatest musicals—Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins's big-screen adaptation of 1961's West Side Story—Spielberg stunned critics and audiences alike last December with his Was shown by releasing the most electric cinematic. Work for at least a decade. The filmmaker admitted that he had grown up admiring the original cast recording of the 1957 Broadway production as a child well before he saw the Wise film, which won Best Picture.
Now, half a century later, Spielberg has proved something else to say about West Side Story by making a film that reiterates the awe and youthful enthusiasm of his early blockbusters. The gymnasium shot is just a drop in the sea of filmmaking energy that's raising all boats in this new adaptation. What is important, however, is that he and screenwriter Tony Kushner's approach to the material brought a new acumen and intelligence to the material, replacing the original musical's longtime lack of awareness of the actual Puerto Rican experience in New York City. Addressing criticisms from, as well as retrospectively looking at the seeds of white pain and class struggle in the tension between the Sharks and the Jets. They live in a world that has already been defeated by gentrification as they take their knives to the "rumble".
It's a magnetic feat that most critics and small but devoted audiences who watched the film were screaming from the rooftops about last holiday season. Sadly, since West Side Story's box office flop, it must have fallen mostly on deaf ears, garnering a modest $10.6 million on its first weekend in the US, and a modest $38 million domestically. Earned, not $73 million worldwide.
Yes, there was a pandemic, and yes there was a renewed concern due to the Omicron version, but none of that stopped Spider-Man: No Way Home from becoming the third-highest-grossing film in American history overall. It became the sixth highest grossing film of all time. Total Qum of $2.2 billion. When it came to the spirited reimagining of West Side Story, viewers could justify the level of caution; When it came to watching, and again, Tom Holland hugging Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield in front of a blue screen, the only thing to be afraid of was fear.
Those are, of course, the breaks that come with playing at a box office casino, especially in such awkward times. And for that reason, it's smart on Disney's part to both let these clips go viral a week before the Disney+ premiere of West Side Story and then go viral in the U.S. Offer a great start on the second most popular streaming service in the US.
Like Encanto, an entire global audience that didn't go to theaters for a movie that wasn't a superhero sequel or spinoff is about to find a giddy musical on most family-friendly services. In retrospect, Encanto's wild Disney+ success earned that original animated musical the Oscar lead in the Best Animated Film category, and even one of its more entertaining songs, Lin-Manuel Miranda's "We Don't". Talk About Bruno" into one. The most popular Disney single since the TikTok sensation and "Let It Go".
One can easily imagine that if Disney had known about the popularity "We Don't Talk About Bruno" was going to enjoy due to Disney+, they would have replaced it with "Dos Orgutas" as the film's Best Original Song entry at the Oscars. as will be presented.
If West Side Story receives a similar level of discovery, one might wonder whether the Academy would have thought twice about turning Kushner's sensitive and thoughtful reworking of the original book from West Side Story into the Best Adapted Screenplay category. ? Or, unbelievably, not getting this technical marvel nominated for Best Editing?
As it stands, West Side Story is viewed by some forecasters as the biggest contest in Power of the Dog's best picture category, despite WSS not being nominated for any of the above categories. And for context, the last Best Picture winner to win without Oscar approval for screenplay and editing was Laurence Olivier's Hamlet in 1949.
That's another way of saying that the odds are not in favor of West Side Story, and if the film is actually able to garner any major ups and downs on Oscar night, it's in large part due to the film's high ratings on streaming. Maybe because of visibility—because of Disney+.
As a testament to the power of streaming, it's striking. As a harbinger of the future of cinema, it's still not a wonderful thing. Best Picture win or lose, 2021's West Side Story still fails at the box office. While the film is so good that it's still satisfying in its own right that the film is finally finding its audience on social media and Disney+ — and perhaps deserves to be a classic yet — this failure tells a familiar narrative. Like Ridley Scott's The Last Duel or del Toro's own Nightmare Alley, or Edgar Wright's Last Night in Soho for that matter, a film based on a popular fanboy-friendly franchise crashed and burned at the box office, even though When West Side Story and arguably Nightmare Alley were remakes the name was recognizable. (Incidentally, Wright was also celebrating WSS on social media last week.)
West Side Story is a beautiful film that deserves an audience to discover, and one that deserves to be recognized for its achievements. But if it doesn't prove itself to be a box office success, it becomes very difficult to get any film on that scale and with that level of craft if it doesn't have a superhero or Skywalker.
Despite having a really great year for film musicals, all of the releases in theaters, including In the Heights and last weekend's beloved Cyrano with Peter Dinklage, struggled to find audiences. Miranda's impressive directorial debut, Tick, Tick... Boom! which earned star Garfield an Oscar nomination for Best Actor. And yet, that movie was released exclusively on a streaming service, and also the most popular at that, Netflix.
Then again, it would be easy to say that this would soon become the future of music. Still, if this is a fact, it is sad. The music is almost as old as the movies themselves, going back to the first talkie, The Jazz Singer (1927). A film like West Side Story is best suited for a giant screen with huge speakers and huge audiences, who can simultaneously get lost in a vast imagination. And a movie that's technically accomplished, including the shot above, that has people going crazy needs the kind of budget that theatrical release can (in theory) underwrite but the streaming services themselves can't. can do
When a movie like West Side Story flops, it's so hard to find another true visionary musical that can captivate us again; The big screen makes it so hard to watch anything else that the CGI effect doesn't need to be elevated; And it becomes so difficult for us to find it with space.