The Paper's reporter Cheng Xiaojun
On Friday (December 13), a new version of the song and dance film "West Side Story", directed by Hollywood director Steven Spielberg, was released in a total of 2820 theaters in North America. As a result, at the end of the weekend, only $10.5 million at the box office, compared with the film's production cost of up to $100 million, it is doomed to a huge loss.
The new version removes the old version of the "racial discrimination" label
Originally invested and produced by Twentieth Century Fox, after Fox was fully acquired by Disney, the publicity and distribution work was also transferred to the latter, exactly as the previously released Ridley Scott's work "The Final Duel". The production cost of "The Last Duel" is also as high as 100 million US dollars, and the global box office so far is 30 million US dollars, which is also doomed to a big loss. In fact, this practice of making blockbusters at any cost is the main reason for twentieth century Fox's poor financial situation before it was acquired.
The West Side Story first appeared on Broadway in 1957 and was released in 1961 as a film of the same name based on it. This time, the remake is exactly the same as the release of the earlier movie version. In the past sixty years, American society has undergone great changes, and the audience's tastes have changed significantly.
Stills from the new Edition of West End Story
I think that year, "West End Story" not only made a big profit at the box office, but also won ten Oscars, including best picture. However, time has changed, and this classic has long been labeled racist by the "awakened generation" in the United States today. They criticize the young men and women of the Shark Gang in the film, who are clearly Puerto Ricans who have emigrated to the United States according to the plot, and the result is that the actors are all white people like the heroine Natalie Wood, and they also smear their faces with heavy dark oil paint to try to increase their credibility, which is really disrespectful to the Puerto Rican community.
So, in this new version, the heroine Maria is played by The Colombian-American actress Rachel Zegler, and the men and women of the Shark Gang are all Latino actors. In addition, compared to the treatment of Puerto Ricans in the earlier film version who speak English and almost never speak their native Spanish, the Spanish conversation between the shark gang members in this new version is significantly more. More critically, Spielberg decided to include these parts of the Spanish dialogue without adding any English subtitles.
He said that the reason why Latino actors were 100% found to play shark gang members this time is to achieve the goal of diversity and inclusion, and the practice of not subtitleing Spanish dialogue is also very much in line with this practice. "If I add subtitles to Spanish, I'm putting too much emphasis on English and putting English above Spanish." Such a situation could not have happened in our film, and I had to give Spanish enough respect, so I didn't add subtitles. ”
In this regard, many viewers and film critics have affirmed this approach, believing that this gives the film a thicker story background. As for whether this practice will cause audiences who do not know Spanish to be unable to understand the plot, many viewers who have seen the film have said that relying on the expressions of the characters and the background of the upper and lower plots, it is not a problem to understand the meaning of these dialogues.
From these changes, it is not difficult to see that the 74-year-old director has made a lot of efforts to show his progressive attitude and concept of keeping pace with the times this time. In fact, Spielberg and the film's screenwriter Tony Kushner personally visited Puerto Rico as early as 2018 to listen to the opinions and suggestions of locals. In addition, they hired community leaders like José Antonio Tijerino, president of the Hispanic Heritage Foundation, as advisors in the hope that the new version of "West End Story" would not cause any unnecessary controversy when it was released.
Stills from West End Story
Song and dance films have generally not done well at the box office during the pandemic
At present, it seems that there is no controversy, but there is no box office. Analyzing the reasons behind it, the first thing that comes to mind in the industry is the genre problem of the song and dance film itself. From the perspective of historical achievements, American audiences actually prefer to watch song and dance films on the big screen, "Mamma Mia", "Les Misérables" and "King of the Circus" have won good results, especially at the end of the year, song and dance films are especially in line with the booming festive atmosphere, so the industry generally expected that the opening box office of "West End Story" would reach about 20 million US dollars. After all, in terms of popularity, this is probably the biggest IP in American song and dance films, and the stage play of the same name and the old version of the film have a lot of influence. In primary and secondary schools across the United States, there has been a tradition of performing the whole book or fragment of "West End Story" on the campus stage for decades, and its mass base can be described as extremely large.
However, under the epidemic, the fate of song and dance films has changed greatly compared with the past. After all, compared with superhero comic films, the main audience of song and dance films is still dominated by middle-aged and elderly audiences and female audiences, and this part of the population is precisely the most sensitive group to the epidemic. "To Evan Hansen" released this year is also a dismal box office, if it is still because the word of mouth is not ideal, then even "In the Highlands", which is well-rated enough, can only win $43.8 million in the global box office (production cost of $55 million), which is enough to explain the problem. Moreover, according to Warner insiders, "In the Heights", which landed on the HBO Max streaming platform on the same day of release, was not ideal in terms of online viewers. This seems to show that in the face of the ups and downs of the epidemic, American audiences are not in the mood to sit down and enjoy the genre of song and dance films. As a result, some of this year's other song and dance films — whether it's "Everybody's Talking About Jamie" introduced in the UK, "Annette" from France, or "Tick, Tick", which claims to be comparable to "Philharmonic City". Boom!) did not choose a distribution method for large-scale entry into theaters in North America.
However, even "In the Highlands", the opening box office has also received 11.5 million US dollars, and "In the Highlands" is still released online and offline, and the new version of "West End Story" can only be seen in theaters. As a result, some people in the industry suspect that it is caused by the scandal of the male protagonist Ansel Elgort.
Ansel Algot
On June 19, 2020, a female netizen posted a post accusing Ansel of sexually assaulting her twice when she was 17 and 20 years old. The next day, Allerg admitted to having had sexual relations with the other party, but stressed that all of them were legal and voluntarily carried out by both parties, but also apologized for the "immature and cruel practices" that he still pestered the other party after the breakup. A few days later, the woman deleted her own posts, closed her social media accounts, and has not appeared again, while El gaut has accordingly removed apology posts and significantly reduced her social media activity. Subsequently, several women also posted online accusations that Elgault had said or acted inappropriately to them when they were minors, but Elgault has not responded to this since.
Under Disney's protection, throughout the promotion of "West End Story", there was basically no media person who questioned Ansel Allerg on this issue. However, on the Internet, there are still many netizens who seem to be less forgetful. They left messages under various West End story promotional videos questioning why the media had so easily let go of the Ansel Al-Gaut scandal and calling on the public to boycott the film. However, it is impossible to know exactly how much this relatively sporadic boycott and appeal had a substantial impact on the box office of "West End Story" in the first weekend.
Of course, this is not to say that "West End Story" has completely failed, and in the past, there have been precedents of song and dance films that have not started well but slowly won back the lost land at the box office with the fermentation of word-of-mouth. The 2002 song and dance film "Chicago" opened for only $10.8 million, but eventually earned more than $300 million; in 2017, "King of the Circus" opened for only $8.8 million, but eventually earned more than $400 million worldwide.
The new version of "West End Story" received a super high critic rating and audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes
At present, it seems that the audience who has seen "West End Story" is still quite satisfied with the film itself, whether it is the results of the first round of audience polls or the audience score on the film review website "Rotten Tomatoes", there are more than 90% of the praise. Therefore, in time, relying on word-of-mouth promotion, "West Side Story" recovered the box office lost ground, perhaps not completely hopeless.
However, the time does not seem to be on the side of "West End Story", after all, "Spider-Man: Heroes Of No Return" killed this Friday. Following breaking the pre-sale record in the US film market, the film's recent pre-sales in the UK have also been quite good. As the largest theater line in the United Kingdom, more than 120 theaters under Odeon sold more than 200,000 copies in the first week after the launch of the "Spider-Man" pre-sale tickets, surpassing the pre-sale record of "Avengers 4: Endgame" in 2019, and has tripled the growth compared with the previous "007: No Time to Die", which fully reflects the expectations of young audiences for this work and the blessing of the traditional festival schedule in Europe and the United States.
Editor-in-Charge: Zhang Zhe