Steven Spielberg Refused to Use Subtitles in ‘West Side Story’ and ‘Give English the Power Over Spanish’

Spielberg has become disappointing in his later years. The wokery is strong with him.

I miss the old days when he was the young, affable director that everyone liked who was turning out excellent film after excellent film. Now he's a lefty political crusader who has forgotten how to make a crowd pleaser and is becoming increasingly more divisive.

What I am thinking of is, if it's so powerful the expressions, why even use Spanish at all? Just have Mr. Bean-type speak and prove it by making it universally unknown to all.

This "West Side Story" solely exists to check boxes and for Spielberg to, late in life, try to level up with the easily damaged Gen Z crowd.

Elitist

As an English-speaking person who never learned a foreign language, the reason I like subtitles is I can know what is going on. Racism has nothing to do with it. Case closed!!!

[deleted]

So why have spoken dialogue at all? If the cast is so expressive that the scenes "prove universal" (I think I know what you're trying to say here), then eliminating all dialogue would make the film truly universal. It would be perfectly egalitarian. Right?

This was a very silly decision by an otherwise acclaimed director.

I'm not going to judge Spielberg's decision not to use subtitles for scenes in Spanish until I've actually seen the film. Right now there's a lot of speculative garbage out there. For instance, we are told "as much as 40% may be in Spanish." Did that guy who started that rumor have a stopwatch while viewing the film, timing every Spanish-only scene? I'm going to reserve judgement til I've seen it.