Before the Academy Awards, the Disney+ release of West Side Story is reigniting interest in a Steven Spielberg classic… Is the film, however, saved?
On the way to Oscar voting season, the internet discovered Steven Spielberg had directed a West Side Story film.
Please forgive the glibness, but it definitely seemed that way last week when Film Twitter was flooded with astonished replies to a single post that unveiled only a single sample of Spielberg’s energetic film rendition of the Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim musical. A single, mind-numbingly intricate dolly and crane (or drone?) shot follows a number of people, including Maria (Rachel Zegler) and Anita (Ariana DeBose), as they enter a school gymnasium for a dance. The camera swirls and pirouettes over the dance floor, flies and swoons, all while transmitting a maximum density of information to the spectator in that one image.
“[Spielberg] made the camera dance,” Guillermo del Toro exclaimed on Twitter. As a film connoisseur and auteur, del Toro had no doubt seen and studied Spielberg’s debut musical’s astonishing perfection. Nonetheless, he wanted to take advantage of the chance to spread the message after another Twitter user shared the video. It’s Shane Anderson’s below, which simply stated, “This picture from WEST SIDE STORY is fucking incredible.”
This shot from WEST SIDE STORY is fucking insane. pic.twitter.com/krmqHHklRr
— Shane Anderson 🏳️🌈 (@ShaneM_Anderson) February 26, 2022
Yes, it is, and it is something to be proud of. But, judging by the way the video went viral and how many tens of thousands of people were astonished by Janusz Kamiski’s cinematography, it was evident that a lot of them—probably the majority of them—had never seen that or any other moment from Spielberg’s West Side Story. These are people that spend their weekends tweeting about movies!
This reality belies both Disney’s shrewdness in reigniting interest in the film a week before Oscar voters begin casting their final ballots, as well as the slight tragedy of an aesthetically stunning film like West Side Story yet being a box office flop.
Despite early scepticism about Spielberg’s decision to remake one of cinema’s greatest musicals—Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins’ 1961 big screen adaptation of West Side Story—Spielberg astonished critics and the audiences who did show up last December by releasing his most electrifying cinematic work in at least a decade.
The filmmaker stated that he grew up idolising the original cast recording of the 1957 Broadway performance long before seeing the Wise film, which won Best Picture.
Now, half a century later, Spielberg demonstrates that he had more to say about West Side Story by crafting a picture that resurrected the astonishment and young enthusiasm of his early blockbusters. In this new rendition, the gymnasium shot is simply a drop in the ocean of cinematic energy that is rising all boats. But, perhaps more crucially, his and author Tony Kushner’s treatment to the material gave it a new level of sensitivity and intelligence, addressing long-standing complaints of the original musical’s lack of understanding of the true Puerto Rican experience in New York City.as well as recognising the seeds of white resentment and class problems in the rivalry between the Sharks and Jets in retrospect. As they take their blades to “the Rumble,” they live in a world that has already been lost to gentrification.
It’s a magnetic achievement that most critics and the tiny but devoted audience who watched the film last holiday season were shouting from the rooftops about. Unfortunately, it appears to have fallen on mainly deaf ears, as West Side Story bombed at the box office, grossing a meagre $10.6 million in its debut weekend in the United States and a total of $38 million domestically and $73 million globally.
Yes, there was a pandemic, and yes, the Omicron strain caused increased fear, but none of it stopped Spider-Man: No Way Home from becoming the third most earning film in the United States and the sixth highest grossing film worldwide, with a total gross of $2.2 billion. When it came to watching Tom Holland hug Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield in front of a blue screen again and again, spectators might excuse a level of caution; when it came to seeing Tom Holland hug Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield in front of a blue screen, the only thing to fear was fear itself.
Of all, those are the breaks that come with gambling at a box office casino, especially at such odd times. As a result, Disney’s decision to enable these snippets to become viral a week before West Side Story’s Disney+ release and then deliver a splashy premiere on the second most popular streaming service in the United States is brilliant.
As with Encanto, a worldwide audience that has never seen a film that isn’t a superhero sequel or spinoff is going to be introduced to a gleeful musical on the most family-friendly of platforms. In retrospect, Encanto’s extraordinary Disney+ popularity made the original animated musical an Oscar favourite in the Best Animated Film category, and even propelled Lin-Manuel Miranda’s “We Don’t Talk About Bruno,” a TikTok smash and the most successful Disney single since “Let It Go,” become a TikTok craze.
If Disney had realised how successful “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” was about to become as a result of Disney+, they might have submitted it instead of “Dos Orguitas” as the film’s Best Original Song submission at the Oscars.
If West Side Story achieves a comparable degree of acclaim, one would question if the Academy would have considered Kushner’s delicate and careful rewrite of the original novel in the Best Adapted Screenplay category. Or, more bafflingly, failing to nominate this technological masterpiece for Best Editing?
Despite the fact that West Side Story was not nominated for each of the aforementioned categories, some predictors see it as Power of the Dog’s strongest rival in the Best Picture category. To put things in perspective, Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet won Best Picture in 1949 without receiving an Oscar nomination for Screenplay and Editing.
That is to say, the odds are stacked against West Side Story, and if the picture manages to pull off any major upsets on Oscar night, it will likely be due in large part to the film’s enormous awareness on streaming–thanks to Disney+.
It’s a powerful example of the power of streaming. It’s not always a good thing when it comes to predicting the future of cinema. Whether it wins Best Picture or not, 2021’s West Side Story is a movie office flop. While it’s certainly pleasing on its own that the picture is now finding an audience on social media and Disney+—and possibly yet becoming the classic it deserves to be—the failure tells a familiar storey. A movie not based on a big fanboy-friendly series, like Ridley Scott’s The Last Duel or del Toro’s own Nightmare Alley, or even Edgar Wright’s Last Night in Soho, bombed at the box office.Even when West Side Story and, to a lesser extent, Nightmare Alley were well-known remakes. (Wright, by the way, was also celebrating WSS on social media last week.)
West Side Story is a great picture that needs to find an audience and be recognised for its accomplishments. But if it doesn’t succeed at the box office, it’ll be far more difficult to get a movie of that scale and quality done if it doesn’t star a superhero or Luke Skywalker.
Despite the fact that it was a very terrific year for film musicals, all of the ones that were released in theatres, including In the Heights and the exquisite Cyrano with Peter Dinklage this past weekend, failed to find an audience. Miranda’s own excellent directorial debut, tick, tick… BOOM!, which won actor Andrew Garfield an Oscar nod for Best Actor, proved to be the only one that seemed to have an influence on pop culture without the stigma of commercial disappointment. Despite this, the film was only available through a streaming service, and the most popular one at that, Netflix.
It’s simple to predict that this will soon become the musical’s future. However, if that is the case, it is a terrible truth. Musicals have been around almost as long as movies, dating back to the first talkie, The Jazz Singer (1927). A film like West Side Story is ideally suited for a big screen, big speakers, and a big audience who can all get lost in a big fantasy together. And a picture this technically proficient, as seen by the above shot, which has people going insane, necessitates a budget that theatrical releases (in principle) can afford but streaming services alone cannot.
When a film like West Side Story fails, it becomes that much more difficult to find another true visionary musical that can enthral us again; it becomes that much more difficult to see anything else on the big screen that doesn’t rely on CGI effects to soar; and it becomes that much more difficult to find that somewhere with a place for us.