HOW COVID KILLED GROWN-UP MOVIES AT THE THEATER: Audiences may never leave their couches again — unless it’s for Spider-Man 7.

The box office news from earlier this December was mixed. The stupendous success of the latest Spider-Man sequel, No Way Home, indicated that fears of the Omicron variant have not deterred audiences from coming out in the millions: it grossed $260 million at the US box office and $600 million globally.

But it also trampled other less franchise-friendly films. Guillermo del Toro’s new picture Nightmare Alley debuted to a dismal $3 million, and Steven Spielberg’s version of West Side Story will be one of the director’s greatest flops, having grossed a mere $18 million in the US so far. The chances of either film — expensively mounted period pieces from A-list directors — recouping their production budgets at the theater, let alone their advertising costs, is zero.

I can’t entirely blame COVID on the West Side Story remake’s failure; its director very likely doomed its box office chances with this uber-woke decision: “Forgoing subtitles for the Spanish dialogue was a deliberate decision. ‘If I subtitled the Spanish,’ Mr. Spielberg told entertainment digital media platform IGN, ‘I’d simply be doubling down on the English and giving English the power over the Spanish … I needed to respect the language enough not to subtitle it.’”