It’s always a guilty pleasure of mine when a big, woke Hollywood remake bombs hard at the box office. It happened to Hollywood director Steven Spielberg’s pandering West Side Story remake upon its recent debut.
Could it have anything to do with the fact that it was marketed to the “Latinx'' community by the director himself? After all, “everything woke turns to sh*t,” as they say.
Nerd culture outlet BoundingIntoComics.com surmised that it was the wokeness that did the movie in and we’re inclined to agree.
During its debut weekend, the film – yet another movie adaptation of the Broadway classic created by Jerome Robbins and Stephen Sondheim – dragged in a pathetic $10.5 million.
Combined with the global box office earnings of $4.4 million, the movie generated a pathetic $14.9 worldwide during its opening. That’s a dismal start considering the film cost $100 million to make.
According to the outlet, for such a big-budget production to be profitable “it more than likely needs to gross around $250 million, a number that looks completely out of sight.” Sorry, Steven.
The movie, which is centered on a Romeo and Juliet love story caught in the middle of a gang war between a white gang and a Puerto Rican gang in the Upper West Side of Manhattan in the 1950s, heavily pandered to the Latinx community. If anything is explicitly aimed at the “Latinx” community, you know it is a woke-fest.
Again, “Latinx” is the progressive version of "Latino" meant to remove the gendered aspect of the word as it is, based upon the Spanish language. It’s an attempt to be PC. It’s absolutely ridiculous considering the entire language Hispanics speak is split in feminine and masculine-gendered words. Also, 40% of Hispanics detest being referred to as "Latinx" and virtually none of them use it, according to recent polling.
That same polling shows that at least 30% of Latinos are less likely to vote for or support politicians if they use the term “Latinx.” For the same reason, they might be opting out of seeing this film.
RELATED: SHOCKER: Democrats Pollsters Find ‘LatinX’ Offends A LOT of Hispanics
In the lead up to his film’s debut, Spielberg leaned into this progressive pandering. According to BoundingIntoComics.com, during a recent interview with IGN.com, Spielberg expressed his commitment to only casting people from “Latinx countries” for the Hispanic roles.
“That was a mandate that I put down to Cindy Tolan, who cast the movie, that I’m not going to entertain any auditions of anybody who isn’t… Parents or grandparents or themselves from Latinx countries, especially Puerto Rico.”
He then referred to "Latinx" people a second time in the same interview while admitting that he mandated that the film not feature any subtitles for the film’s spoken Spanish. Apparently, that makes it more inclusive, if making that part of the film totally inaccessible to non-Spanish speakers is inclusive, that is.
Spielberg told IGN, “I didn’t want to subtitle any of the Spanish out of respect for the inclusivity of our intentions to hire a totally Latino, Latinx cast to play the Shark boys and girls.”
In another interview, Spielberg reiterated, “And the authenticity would not have been possible without the mandate to which I put down, placed down on the whole company that every single Shark boy and girl must be Latinx.”
Wait, wait, wait. So, let’s get this straight, Spielberg made a movie that only Spanish speakers could fully understand and then also marketed that movie using woke terminology that nearly half of Spanish speakers detest and only about 2% use?
Honestly, it sounds like he didn't want anyone to see this movie. No wonder it bombed hard.