A year ago, when the pandemic was first raging, director Jon Chu faced a painful decision: He could send his new musical adaptation of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s In the Heights straight to streaming on HBO Max or wait for the theaters to reopen once the pandemic was over—a depressingly indeterminate time.
The movie—about a community of immigrant friends and families struggling to find their sueñitos alive in New York’s Washington Heights—arrives in a poetic new context that not even Hollywood could have dreamed up: In the Heights, screening in thousands of theaters in the U.S., is the first real blockbuster film to test the power of cinemas after a year of closure.
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