Spielberg's Woke Take on "West Side Story" Performs Like You'd Expect Woke Productions Do

David Hou

Go woke, go broke. It’s a phrase that needs to be slapped onto the first page of the “best business practices” handbook, and yet despite repeated failures from productions and products leaning hard to the left, industries just aren’t getting it. The latest proof is the returns for Steven Spielberg’s latest outing, the “West Side Story” revamp.

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According to the website The-Numbers, the 2021 retelling of the classic musical has raked in over $14 million in its opening weekend. The production budget was around $100 million with the targeted goal of earning $250 million. With these earnings on the opening weekend being this abysmal, Spielberg might as well be trying to reach the stratosphere on a trampoline.

It was likely doomed to failure from the get-go. Not only have the silver screens still not fully recovered their once-great luster, but Spielberg and other cast and crew had also shot themselves in the foot from the beginning.

For one, Spielberg refused to make the Spanish-speaking parts in the movie subtitled, claiming the reason was that if he did that then he would be giving English power over Spanish. This is in conjunction with refusing to hire anyone who isn’t from, or descended from, a “Latinx” country.

“That was a mandate that I put down to Cindy Tolan who cast the movie, that I wasn’t going to entertain any auditions that aren’t parents or grandparents or themselves from Latinx countries,” Spielberg told IGN. “Especially Puerto Rico, we looked a lot in Puerto Rico, we have 20 performers in our film from Puerto Rico or they’re Nuyorican.

“That was very important and that goes hand-in-hand with my reasoning for not subtitling the Spanish. If I subtitled the Spanish I’d simply be doubling down on the English and giving English the power over the Spanish. This was not going to happen in this film, I needed to respect the language enough not to subtitle it.”

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It’s a very woke position to take, and like most woke positions, it’s absolute nonsense. If people can’t understand the points of dialogue, it only makes the movie harder to follow. Moreover, putting down subtitles does not give one language power over another…it’s just translation.

But the reference to the Latin community as “Latinx” probably didn’t help. The Latin community has repeatedly made it clear that they don’t like the term, yet the “progressive” left continues to use it as if they know better.

But it didn’t stop there. The film was also plagued with more reasons for people not to show up, including West Side Story screenwriter Tony Kushner calling the film an “anti-racist, democratic musical.”

“The creators believed very deeply that race hatred and bigotry and oppression and discrimination are profoundly malevolent aberrations and can lead to cataclysmic consequences,” he said according to The Holywood Reporter. “And I think that is the tragedy of West Side Story. It is an anti-racist, democratic musical.”

Being against racism is a good thing, but the term “anti-racist” in today’s age is going to immediately send up alarm bells for many, and usually means it’s going to be incredibly racist, usually toward white people. Attaching the word “democratic” only solidifies that thought in the heads of many Americans. Woke productions are usually very hateful pieces of work.

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It also doesn’t help that one of its stars, Rachel Zegler, had been promoting the abolishment of police and thinks that Kyle Rittenhouse is the example of what’s wrong with this country, referring to him as a white supremacist. She also found the fact that he was found not guilty of all charges proof of “white privilege.”

It’s a perfect storm of reasons to avoid watching this film, which it appears many people did.

Another well-deserved bomb.

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