Not sure but they'll find a way. I'm not going to list examples because I don't want to give them ideas.
Steven Speilberg's new movie, a remake of the musical classic, West Side Story.
- Thread starter Samtemdo8
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I suppose the big question here is, how much are they spending on this movie?
Like I’d imagine with an economical cast and the undoubted vast warehouses of period clothes and props we aren’t looking at a VFX heavy movie. Not in the way something like Avengers Endgame or Godzilla vs. Kong is. I mean some CGI to change the skyline for location shots and soundstage effects isn’t exactly budget breaking these days.
So sure, maybe the movie only does $500million worth of business, but if only costs $50-$60million to make, that’s good cheddar.
Like I’d imagine with an economical cast and the undoubted vast warehouses of period clothes and props we aren’t looking at a VFX heavy movie. Not in the way something like Avengers Endgame or Godzilla vs. Kong is. I mean some CGI to change the skyline for location shots and soundstage effects isn’t exactly budget breaking these days.
So sure, maybe the movie only does $500million worth of business, but if only costs $50-$60million to make, that’s good cheddar.
I don't think cerebral excludes pleasing, or that crowd-pleaser is equivalent of "dumb popcorn movie".
Still profitable on modest returns, but that is a much higher margin for error. Hope they’ve got their best dancing shoes on.
It could go either way. West Side Story's subject matter hasn't really aged much, Romeo and Juliet's essentially timeless, and systemic and personal racism still bedevil the US. I think the music could be a big hurdle. The songs are very much of the style that was common for musicals in the 1950s, which tended not to have the big pounding singalong choruses that tend to define more modern stuff. Also Bernstein was really flexing his composing muscles so it's full of dissonance and complex structures and all of it's tied together by motifs, and it's largely not that toe tapping. "America" is the most conventional thing in it, and it's like that because it's thematically divorced from all the other music in the show. The dancing also ties a lot of it together, it's a lot more like a ballet in form than a lot of other musicals, which has always made it kind of an outlier. I think a good production of West Side Story could do very well, but I don't think it'll pull the same kind of repeat business as other recent more conventional musicals, so they'll need to get more unique bums on seats.
Well, regardless I wish them luck. People want more variety at the box office, well, here's a musical based on one of the oldest tales in the (not a comic) book. No spandex here, just greasers and tap dancing.