Unfortunately, I chose not to see Gladiator 2 this weekend. Or Wicked. Then again, I’m never going to see Wicked. Nor will I allow Wicked to see me. But I do have a connection to this weekend’s box office. I started watching the musical, In The Heights, last night. In The Heights was directed by Jon M. Chu, the same director who directed Wicked. Nobody knows that because In the Heights was Lin Manuel Miranda’s first big musical after leaving Broadway so he got all the press.
Few people know about the movie, anyway, because it was released during Covid and because a lot of folks assumed it was being celebrated for its diversity rather than its quality. But if you go to Rotten Tomatoes right now, the film has a stellar 94% RT score and a 94% audience score. Those kinds of dual scores are unheard of.
I’d given the movie a shot once before but I found the opening musical sequence so bad that I turned it off after 5 minutes. This time, however, I pushed through and after that opening sequence, the movie improved considerably.
I was curious about this from a screenwriting perspective. Why did I hate it at first yet like it the more I watched it? The answer was obvious. The opening musical number was highly specific. It celebrated two things – the Latino culture and what it was like to live in Washington Heights. I have zero connection to either of these things. I felt alienated, like the movie was deliberately saying, “We’re not speaking to you.”
But then something happened. There’s a convenience store owner who’s the focus of the story. A woman comes into his shop and it’s clear that he likes her. She comes all the time. He doesn’t have the balls to ask her out. THAT’S a universal experience right there. That’s something I can relate to. So, all of a sudden, I was pulled in.
From there, a young woman arrives in the neighborhood and we’re told she just got back from her first year at Stanford. She was the “prodigal daughter” of the neighborhood, the one who was smart and was going to go on to do great things and represent Washington Heights. But as she sings her story, we realize she hates Stanford. She’s not going back. And she has to face all these people who she symbolizes hope for.
That’s another universal experience: Coming back to your hometown. Having those conflicted feelings of being home and bringing back the experiences from where you went off to. Often, you have not experienced the success you expected to. It’s a very unsettling feeling. As a result, I immediately resonated with this character.
And that’s the lesson here. You want to key in on these universal themes that people experience in life. Lost love, coming of age, rediscovering your identity after you’ve lost it, fall from grace, redemption, revenge, sacrifice. Specificity is important to convey authenticity. But it, alone, is not going to pull a reader in. You do that via universal themes because once a reader relates to a character, they’re emotionally controlled by that character. Which is exactly what happened here.
All right, let’s get to this weekend’s double dynamic doozy of Wicked and Gladiator 2. Wicked pulled in 114 million dollars. I must admit, I have no context for how or why musicals succeed or fail at the box office. I remember when Cats, the most successful show in history on Broadway, came out and made 5 dollars. Why Wicked made 113,999,995 more than Cats is beyond my comprehensive abilities.
I’m just going to say it. I think Ariana Grande is creepy. Her creepy baby girl voice despite being 31 years old gives me the shivers every time I hear it. Cynthia Ervo may be loudly celebrated in certain Hollywood circles. But ever since she ruined the awesome HBO series, The Outsider, I’ve been an anti-fan.
But here’s where I will give Wicked props. It was the OG franchise that asked the question, “What if being the good guy is just a matter of perspective?” More specifically, what if the Wicked Witch is just misunderstood? That ignited a slew of movies and shows that have asked the same question over the years. Most recently we have Cobra Kai, which posed the question, “What if Johnny is actually the good guy and Daniel LaRusso is the jerk?”
I also find The Wizard of Oz to be the best road trip movie ever conceived. It’s a great template for anyone writing a road trip film. I’ve been a fan of fresh takes on The Wizard of Oz here dating all the way back to the script Oh Never Spectre Leaf, which won my very first screenplay contest.
And look, Wicked has finally destroyed the “musical curse” in Hollywood. Up until now, it was thought that musicals couldn’t do well anymore. The Color Purple did terribly. Mean Girls fell off a cliff once word got out that it was a musical. We all know what happened with Joker. But, it turns out, if you’ve got the right combination of IP and eager customer base, people WILL show up for a musical. So don’t stop writing them!
And now to Gladiator 2. 55 million dollars isn’t a ton of money for an opening weekend. But the original, which debuted in 2000, made 34 million dollars. Which, in today’s money, would be 63 million dollars. So it’s not far off from how the original film did.
As many of you know, since you follow this site, they have been trying to make a sequel to Gladiator forever. The problem? The main character died. But do you think that scares Hollywood? Hell no. They even wrote a version of Gladiator 2 where Maximus adventures into the afterlife!
I know that they also considered prequels but Russel Crowe is not built for prequels. The man ages 5 years for every one year here on earth. Which left the movie in a weird position. It needed all this time to pass so that they could definitively say that there was no way to bring Russell Crowe back. Only then could they move on and focus on new characters. And I love Paul Mescal. I think he’s going to have an amazing career.
But me not getting to the theater says a lot. My movie theater situation is just difficult enough that if I don’t think a movie can entertain me, I won’t go. And as I sat on the precipice of going to see this film, I thought to myself, “Man, that trailer looked really messy.” There were a million things going on in it. I wasn’t clear what the story was. In my experience of reading 10,000 screenplays, if there’s too much going on, the story falls apart quickly. I wasn’t willing to risk 3 precious hours of my life for that likely outcome.
But I’m curious what you guys thought. Was it any good?
