Romeo and Juliet on screen the story have also been filmed, most notably "West Side Story", Prokofiev's ballet "Romeo and Juliet" and "Romanoff and Juliet". Several theatrical films, such as "Shakespeare in Love" and "Romeo Must Die", consciously use elements of Shakespeare's plot. Producer Irving Thalberg pushed MGM for five years to make a "Romeo and Juliet", in the face of the studio's opposition: which stemmed from Louis B. Mayer's belief that the masses considered the Bard over their heads, and from the austerity forced on the studios by the depression. It was only when Jack L. Warner announced his intention to film Max Reinhardt's
Romeo and Juliet on screen undermining the play's original ending and its lesson concerning the price of peace. Todd McCarthy, in Variety, summed up: "as irritating and glib as some of it may be, there is indisputably a strong vision here that has been worked out in considerable detail." As Zeffirelli's version had done before it, Baz Luhrmann's film broke the record for the highest-grossing Shakespeare film of all time, taking $144m worldwide. Film scholar Douglas Brode claims that "Romeo and Juliet" is the most-filmed play of all time. In the silent era it was filmed by Georges Méliès, which inspired a burlesque by Thomas