Why Did ‘West Side Story’ Bomb?

A warning shot was called out last week, I saw the earth shaking with West Side Story’s box-office prospects. A box-office pundit had sounded the alarm to me and, lo behold, it made a scant $10 million at the U.S. box-office. Bad news for Steven Spielberg’s film.

During the weekend, blame was being thrown around different targets, but, really, I find the explanation for its failures quite easy to dissect. The target audience for a “West Side Story,” or, while we’re at it, “The Last Duel,” has gone into — permanent?— hibernation from theaters. The pandemic-era has made the over 35 crowd unwilling to go back to the movies.

Even before the virus hit, there were red flags. The future of cineplexes was going to be a place mostly for the big blockbusters. Plenty of arthouses closed down the last year and never reopened. Which is why escapist “rollercoasters” such as “Black Widow,” “F9,” and “Venom” will continue to get made, but more critically-acclaimed adult dramas will have to inevitably move to streaming.

It’s a depressing thing to ponder, but West Side Story’s primary targeted audience, the over 35 crowd, just aren’t comfortable returning to movie theatres and it could turn out to be a permanent change.

One look at this year’s twenty highest-grossing films and you can already tell how the future is shaping up. 18 of the 20 top-grossing titles are either remakes, reboots, animation, Marvel/DC or sequels. Only “Free Guy” and “Dune” managed to stray from the fray. Then again, “West Side Story” had Steven Spielberg’s name attached to it, that used to mean something, just three years ago his “Ready Player One” made more than half a billion dollars at the worldwide box-office.

Maybe his brand is no longer relevant or maybe he’s just behind the times in terms of what mass audiences actually now want at the movies. Spielberg used to be the master of big-scaled movies that had mass appeal, bringing in the over 35s in droves. If “West Side Story’s” box-office failure is any indication, it’s not just Spielberg who has lost a big chunk of his older adult audience, it’s also movie theatres.