‘West Side Story’ has tepid box office debut

Steven Spielberg’s lavish “West Side Story” revival made little noise at the box office, debuting with $10.5 million in ticket sales, according to studio estimates Sunday — a worrisome result for a movie industry struggling to recapture its finger-snapping rhythm.

A dazzling widescreen adaptation and Spielberg’s first musical, “West Side Story” was one of the year’s most eagerly awaited titles.

With a script by Tony Kushner and Rita Moreno returning to her breakthrough film 60 years later, the $100 million “West Side Story” epitomizes a grand-scale prestige film that Hollywood rarely produces anymore. It hit theaters on a wave of glowing reviews.

But “West Side Story” faced a challenging marketplace for both adult-driven releases and musicals. Audiences have steadily returned to multiplexes in the second year of the pandemic, but older moviegoers, who made up the bulk of ticket-buyers for Spielberg’s latest, have been among the slowest to return. Musicals, too, have struggled to catch on in theaters. Lin-Manuel Miranda’s “In the Heights” launched with $11 million in June, but the Warner Bros. release simultaneously streamed on HBO Max. The critically panned “Dear Evan Hansen,” from Universal, debuted with $7.4 million in September.

Spielberg’s film was a long time coming. Its release was delayed a year by the pandemic. It was developed at 20th Century Fox, which was acquired by the Walt Disney Co. shortly before production began. Days before its Lincoln Center premiere, the musical’s lyricist, Stephen Sondheim, died at the age of 91.

Second place for the weekend went to Disney’s animated “Encanto,” which held strong in its third week, dropping only 27 percent from the previous weekend. It grossed $9.6 million from Friday to Sunday, bringing its cumulative total to $71.3 million domestically and $80.5 million internationally.

The weekend’s only other new wide release — STX Films’ college football drama “National Champions” — went largely unnoticed, pulling in $300,000 in 1,197 theaters.