Dan Murrell did some great coverage of the performance (or lack thereof) by West Side Story this week, however, when you look at the fact the, as he points out, it's a movie derived from a 64 year old stage show and an updated version of a 60 year old movie musical, directed by a 74-year old, who loved this movie because it was the first movie he saw as a kid, then yeah, your audience is gonna be old.
And here are the pitfalls of that during COVID recovery for theaters, per Dan Murrell.
As you can see below, the Top 5 openers this year were primarily carried by the Under 25 crowd, which WSS definitely did not with only 26% of it's audience coming from that crowd. It was also a heavily female seen movie. So mostly older, white, females based on the chart above. Why is that a problem?
It's a problem because as you can see below, as of a poll taken in August (published by Variety), the groups that with the lowest confidence to go back to a movie theater were Females Over 25 at 62% and Males Over 25 at 71%. Unsurprisingly, based on the results seen from the top 5 movies above, Males below 25 have are showing 78% comfort in theaters (which was an astonishing 88% only a few weeks before this, which was before we knew about Delta).
Then add on one of the biggest things. Musicals don't open big unless it's a Disney animated or live-action remake, which is only selling so well because of nostalgia and the Disney brand. Here are the Top 5 musical openers (non-Disney live-action remake or animated):
Again, four out of five are Disney movies, but look at the ceiling on that. Even a movie that every middle school girl was excited for back in 2010, HSM 3, could only muster $42M and it had a huge drop after that. Musicals tend to be long plays if they do make big money. The Muppet, Into The Woods, Enchanted, and Mamma Mia all went on to gross very high totals and didn't even start all that high. Same with Mary Poppins Returns and The Greatest showman, which both opened around $10M and are among the top grossing musical movies of all time.
I'm not saying West Side Story is going to be one of those that plays the long game, but if any musical from this year was going to do it, it's this film. It has great reviews, great word of mouth, and it's also got a ton of awards chatter, being mentioned as a possible frontrunner for Best Picture along with Belfast based on the way it's performing at regional critic awards.
