Free Republic

Despite rave reviews, Steven Spielberg's "West Side Story" has failed to gain traction with audiences at the box office...In its first three weeks in cinemas, the film has captured just $36.6 million in global ticket sales. Its production budget was around $100 million, not including marketing costs.

Former President Barack Obama has given his official seal of approval to Steven Spielberg’s woke box-office disaster West Side Story, naming it as one of his favorite movies of 2021. In what has become an annual Obama tradition, the 44th president tweeted a list of his top movies of the past year. And as usual, the list is a precisely calibrated mix of indie darlings, prestige foreign titles, and woke Hollywood fare — all seemingly designed to further ingratiate him with the elite tastemaker crowd, as if their political fealty was ever in doubt.

The new “West Side Story” is, so far, a box-office flop. Steven Spielberg’s much-anticipated remake of the landmark 1961 musical received rave reviews and has been called a masterpiece. Yet its first weekend theatrical release yielded only $10.5 million, which Variety called “a dismal result for a movie of its scale and scope.” --- It’s not woke, it’s wonderful. “America,” that most American of songs, so knowing but not jaded, is done differently from the original but better, more communally, and it’s just as joyous and comic. The Journal’s Joe Morgenstern used exactly the right word to describe this movie:...