Despite warm reviews, Steven Spielberg’s “West Side Story” failed to attract audiences at the box office.
In its first three weeks in theaters, the adaptation of Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim’s Tony Award-winning musical grossed just $36.6 million in global ticket sales. Its production cost was around $100 million, excluding marketing costs.
“It sounds like a write-off to me,” said Eric Handler, media and entertainment analyst at MKM Partners. “The markets that did the best were New York and LA. The film failed to appeal to Central America and did not appear to be able to penetrate well into the Latino community.”
“West Side Story” tells the love story of teenagers from two different social classes in New York City in the 1950s. Tony, a white boy, has an affair with a gang called a gang called “West Side Story”. Jets, and Maria, a young Puerto Rican girl with ties to the Sharks. The Sharks and the Jets are vying for control of the Upper West Side of the city, putting Tony and Maria’s love in the dark.
The musical debuted on Broadway in 1957 and has been restored dozens of times in the decades since.
New iteration of Spielberg, distributed by Disney’s 20th Century Studios, which generated mostly positive reviews from critics, received a 93% certified “Fresh” rating on Rotten Tomatoes. The film was praised for its choreography and singing performances. However, this is still not enough to bring audiences to the cinema.
“[‘West Side Story’] Shawn Robbins, chief analyst at BoxOffice.com, said the majority were victims of timing issues and their inability to appeal to younger audiences. Not only are audiences most wary of returning to public social spaces like movie theaters during the pandemic, but the renewed interest generated by omicron headlines seems to have played a role. in doubling down on that hesitation at the moment. “
Box office analysts say “West Side Story” is also likely to suffer because it doesn’t feature a major Hollywood star and because its release is so close to “Spider-Man: No Way Home”. Latest Marvel Cinematic Universe Movies has dominated the box office for the past two weeks.
In its opening weekend, “West Side Story” grossed $10.5 million, but that number more than halved in its second weekend when the film grossed just $3 million.
“The West Side Story” is expected to rebound this week, said Jeff Bock, senior analyst at Ex Exhibitionor Relations. “You can’t recover when you’ve never been in the box office game in the first place.”
Many had hoped that strong word of mouth would help propel the film, similar to what happened with “The Greatest Showman” in 2017. But “West Side Story” only grossed $2.8 million. la during the Christmas weekend.
The box office is an industry with diminishing returns, which means that each week a movie generates smaller and smaller amounts of money. At this rate, “West Side Story” is not expected to turn a profit.
“And when you spend $100 million to do that, it definitely makes studios reevaluate song and choreography numbers in the future,” Bock said.
Musical movies have struggled at the box office in recent years. During the pandemic, “Dear Evan Hansen” grossed less than $20 million in its global theatrical run, and “In the Heights,” which had a dual release in theaters and worldwide. HBO Max, which secured only $43.8 million worldwide.
2019’s “Cats” replaced iconic Broadway costumes with digital feathers, box office bomb, which grossed only $72.4 million globally on a production budget of approximately $95 million, excluding marketing costs.
In fact, the highest-grossing musical films of the past five years were 2019’s Frozen II, which hit $1.4 billion globally, and the 2017 live-action remake of “Beauty and the Beast” which hit $1. $2.2 billion. According to Comscore data, the only other film in the music category to hit $500 million globally is an animated feature from Illumination called “Sing.”
“The musical genre, at least for now, seems to have fallen out of favor with modern audiences,” said Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst at Comscore.
Disclosure: Comcast is the parent company of NBCUniversal and CNBC. NBCUniversal owns Rotten Tomatoes and distributes “Sing,” “Cats,” and “Dear Evan Hansen.”
