10 Subplots That Saved Entire Movies

The film version of Lin Manuel Miranda's first musical masterpiece, In The Heights, has faced flak for many reasons from many different angles. The one I'm interested in today is the one from fans of the original stage production, who criticized the film's choice to cut out most of the play's subplots. Which, on its own, would be just fine - films do not have the lenience of time that musicals do - but the problem is that in so doing, the film actively lessens the musical's original theme of intergenerational trauma.

Especially since after cutting out the subplots of the original musical, they then replaced them with new ones that fundamentally alter the dynamics of several characters.

All except one, that being the life and tragic death of the character Olga. If they wanted to cut out her subplot they'd have had to not only cut her out of the movie altogether because her whole thing IS how she is a child of a hardworking immigrant who carries the scars of her and her mother's difficult adjustment to living in the states all the way to the grave, but they'd also have had to cut out the heartbreakingly beautiful Pacienca E Fe, the best song in the musical - which would have been grounds for nationwide rioting.

Fortunately, this brilliant song and character were kept mostly completely intact, keeping the film from being a TOTAL betrayal of what its source material was trying to say.