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Notes -
Last month one of the big controversies in online movie discussions was the box office failure of the film BROS:
https://deadline.com/2022/10/bros-billy-eichner-reacts-disappointing-box-office-results-proud-movie-1235133197/
The movie, which was which was promoted as a pioneering mainstream romantic comedy about gay men, earned $11.6 against a $22 million budget.
A lot of coverage lamented that romcoms of all varieties are simply dead as far as theatrical excursions are considered:
https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/bros-disappointing-box-office-debut-142922789.html
This may not be true if the romcom features major Hollywood stars -- the new Julia Roberts/Geroge Clooney movie has already broken the $100 million barrier -- but the cast of BROS is niche, to say the least, if Eichner (a Youtube celeb and bit player in later Parks & Rec seasons) is the most recognizable face in its cast.
Some questioned whether marketing the movie as an important milestone in gay cinema made it less enticing than marketing it as a funny comedy. Apparently, the narrative of the movie gives some prominence to the discussion of gay history, making it feel even more like a "lesson movie;" I don't know -- like everyone else, I did not go to see the movie, and I watch considerably more movies than most people.
Co-writer/star Billy Eichner blamed "homophobic weirdo[s]" for his movie's failure:
https://dailycaller.com/2022/10/03/gay-rom-com-bombs-box-office-billy-eichner-blames-audience-bros/
The movie podcasts I listen to couldn't find their way into discussing this elephant in the room beyond shallow references to Eichner's comment: Is it actually "weirdo" to be "homophobic" by Eichner's standard? Or is homophobia normative and homophilia is the "weirdo" position? 'Not homophobic' in this context, one assumes, means something like Ibram X. Kendi's "anti-racist:" that is, it's not enough to merely not be homophobic, one must be actively affirming of homosexuality (to the point of buying one or more tickets for BROS) to display one's lack of homophobia. However, if homophobia is to be measured by the reaction to BROS, it suggests that so few people are not homophobic that "not homophobic" is a position on the outer fringes of positions.
What I suspect is that maybe even most "allies" who support homosexuality politically with rainbow avatars, buttons, and bumper stickers, aren't going to go out of their way and spend their $30+ for a night out to watch gay men love each other, including an allegedly strong sex scene. Allyship's appeal as a virtue maybe doesn't easily translate into casual "date night" entertainment. For all of the battling over culture war insertions into big franchises mostly owned by Disney, those are still properties that appeal mostly to normies, who are the biggest box office spenders. If you take away all of the normie appeal -- the movie stars, the special effects -- and just leave the important socio-political content, the audience almost completely vanishes, as should be expected.
It also probably didn't help the box office of BROS that its target market --- young urban progressives -- is the same one most hawkishly cautious about COVID and the least likely to return to movie theaters out of what now could be ascribed to superstitious fears of deadly illness.
I had another thought about this movie today that I'm almost sure didn't occur to anyone who is 100% in on the Ally train, and which suggests a systemic blindspot within the pro-homosexual community: the title. "Bros" may be a term that has entered popular lexicon as a synonym for "Buddies," but etymologically it derives from "Brothers." Its meaning is an intentional blurring of the two: "Buddies" who are so close they are like "Brothers." The poster, https://nerdzone-cinemanerdz.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/bros-poster.jpg, which over the title shows the backs of two men each with a hand on the other's blue-jeaned ass, has an inescapable connotation of incest in this context.
If for many normies who have internalized decades of calls for tolerance and are no longer actively anti-gay, gay men still seem, when considered closely, pretty gross, adding an incest connotation multiplies that potential nausea exponentially. Can you imagine a movie poster just like that of BROS, but with a hetero couple, for a movie titled, "Like Brother and Sister?" It's almost inconceivable that this would happen outside of some edgy indie fare. (The only comparison that came to mind is Spanking the Monkey (1994) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanking_the_Monkey, a dark comedy about a fraught and erotic mother-son relationship, which grossed less than $2 million but launched the career of Oscar-nominated director David O. Russell.)
I suspect that, if homosexuality is still, in the broad scope of sexuality, a fringe deviation from the norm, the act of promoting homosexuality as "normal" has made its proponents tone-deaf to the general public's overall aversion to other sexual transgressions, like incest. That suggesting an extreme taboo like incest in the title either was not noticed as an obstacle or was noticed and dismissed is noteworthy because movie studio marketing departments are notorious for micromanaging every detail to an obnoxious degree to be the most blandly appealing to the widest audience.
Even if you don't think the title BROS connotes incest, the far lesser taboo it suggests has been treated as a consequential obstacle by romcoms for several decades. To take the title BROS at its most benign: How many romcoms are about the earthshaking repercussions of crossing the line from platonic hetero friendship to a sexual relationship? It's a staple of the genre and is often the primary conflict for an entire narrative. My guess is that, IRL, the friends-to-lovers pathway is a far more common transgression than vanilla homosexuality, and yet BROS wants to steal the less common transgression as a given and expects a wide audience to accept it without a blink. It doesn't seem a shock that ignorance of one taboo is joined hand-in-ass with willful ignorance of another taboo within the same broad category, increasing the reasons why a normie audience member could be put off from going to see this. The problem is, as I see it, not only that lines are being crossed that the general audience is not ready to cross, but that the censorious nature of public discourse about homosexuality has made its proponents unaware of the lines that are being crossed.
Also, one more line is being crossed: This is an unusually sexually bold poster for any mainstream comedy, let alone a gay one, right? I can't think of any others that depict fondling, except for some low-grade 1980s sex comedies, and even those are mostly leering rather than active groping. If BROS is supposed to be the gay equivalent of middlebrow comedies like NO STRINGS ATTACHED (2011) (https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BMTg2MDQ1NTEzNl5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwOTgxNTMyNA@@.V1.jpg) or FRIENDS WITH BENEFITS (2011) (https://i5.walmartimages.com/asr/417b9424-88ce-47b9-affe-58804b299ea0_1.09201acca0a0b0759d602d050606699d.jpeg) those posters don't show touching at all, surprisingly. I also looked through the posters for several other Judd Apatow-produced comedies from the last 20 years, and the only ones that show actual physical contact are STEP BROTHERS (2008) and BRIDESMAIDS (2011), and the contact in those is non-romantic. This is not a prudish criticism of BROS as much as it is to point out how out-of-step it is with mainstream Hollywood, which does have prudish marketing for comedies, and even for comedies mostly about sex. If the intent of BROS is to push envelopes, fine; but it shouldn't then expect mainstream success. If its makers want mainstream success, they need better self-awareness and management of their envelope-pushing.
Ugh... is no one else going to comment on the fact that the film's trailer was explicitly, openly, character who's a screenwriter insert monologuingly, hostile to the idea of appealing to a straight audience?
Seriously just watch it https://youtube.com/watch?v=SiJoqTk08AI
When your trailer is a monologue about how you're not going to try to appeal to straight audiences... well it seems very weird to complain they didn't show up
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From what I've seen about this movie online, it looked like it was being marketed to gays only - a movie ABOUT being gay made BY gay men FOR gay men! So it's not surprising that straight people generally went "Okay, not for me, I get it" and didn't bother going, whatever about its merits as a comedy or a romantic comedy.
But I think this is going to be the hard, economic realisation: yeah great, all this minority representation and mainstreaming. But if you're still anywhere between only 1-10% of the population, that's your market. If you can't make money off only appealing to 10% of the audience, then you have to make your product more appealing to a wider audience.
I have no interest in the new Top Gun movie, but that's okay: enough people liked the old movie that they wanted to go and see the new one. Nobody expects that it would be a reasonable excuse, had the new movie flopped, for the producers to demand everyone go and see it or else they hate (I dunno, cool fighter jets?) I mean, I do like cool fighter jets, but not enough to sit through a Tom Cruise movie.
So demanding "I made a movie for 10% of the movie-going audience, turns out that's not enough to turn a profit, and it's the viewers fault for not going because they're homophobic" is a stupid excuse that should not be tolerated.
Romcoms are date movies. If you can make it funny enough that a guy will sit through ninety minutes of mushy romance, and mushy romance enough that a woman will sit through fart jokes and crude humour, then people will go see it. If your major selling point is "I'm gay and I star in this!", why would anyone go? Why would even gay guys go?
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The motte and bailey of gay liberation:
"We just want to live our own lives"
versus
"You're all homophobes for not liking my gay movie"
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And yet they did it in the dark ages of 2005 for brokeback mountain that earned 12 times it's meager budget of 15 milllion. The movie just sucks.
"Brokeback Mountain" was different. To be blunt, it wasn't gay, it was slash. Written by a well-regarded female literary author, directed by Ang Lee who did "Sense and Sensibility" and "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" and so knows how to do romance and angst and action and historical/genre drama all in one, and the script co-written by Larry McMurty who had proven ability of writing Western themed stories that contained elements that appealed to women as well as men (the Lonesome Dove series is a family saga, a genre that appeals to women) and starring two straight guys who were heart throbs in a tragic love story that is chock-full of angst and ends tragically - of course it did amazingly. This was the kind of Western that women wanted to go see, and would drag their husbands/boyfriends along with them, or if the men didn't want to go, it could be a girls' night out.
"Bros" is a completely different kettle of fish.
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People like jake gyllenhal and heath ledger. Not so much the annoying voiced sommelier from Parks and Rec.
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This is how I see it as well. It actually reminds me of the movie American Ultra, back in 2015. When it flopped at the box office, the writer (Max Landis) was vocal in grumbling on social media that "people say they want to see an original movie, but this shows people won't actually bother to see an original movie". Except... I saw that movie, as it turns out. It sucked badly. Landis simply didn't want to admit that (in fairness, I wouldn't either), so he chose to place the blame on those pesky audiences.
This strikes me as much the same thing, except conveniently for Eichner his flop of a movie happens to be about gay romance. So he doesn't just get to blame the audience for his movie sucking - he gets to blame the bigoted audience. But as you say, people loved Brokeback Mountain. Turns out that you can't just make a piece of media that panders to the norms of $currentYear, you also have to actually make it good or only the hardcore adherents of ideology are going to be interested in it.
It's an all-purpose, all-weather, can offroad as well as on, excuse. Same with the Rings of Power showrunners: "the reason people criticise our amazing show is not because we can't write to save our lives, it's because they're fascists".
Well, hand me my brown shirt and let me goose-step around the kitchen, so!
Yeah, same with the Wheel of Time show. And really a lot of things now that I think about it: Star Trek, Star Wars, Ghostbusters, basically anything where fans criticized a new iteration of a much-loved franchise. It's always "well those people are bigots" whenever the criticism occurs.
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This is quite a stretch.
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The movie is apparently targeting a smaller audience than most rom-coms while otherwise retreading the same ground. I really don't think you need to go full Freud on it.
Though "going through posters to tally their ass grabs" is oddly fitting for a rationalist-adjacent community like this one.
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I saw the movie with my husband (who apparently would do anything for love). It was funny and entertaining, and I was pleased to see how well this move upholds essentially conservative ideals of monogamy and sacrifice for the sake of your partnership within the context of very permissive do-who-you-want-so-long-as-everyone-consents sexual norms.
"BROS" has a bog-standard rom-com / sex-com story arc. A quirky, passionate, somewhat neurotic, career-driven
girlman is convinced that he is satisfied with his non-experience of love (though plenty of tinder hook-ups). He meets a hottie popular guy who is his exact opposite (conventionally gorgeous, popular, chill). They get together, in the opposites-attract sort of way. They get split up, in the opposites-repel sort of way. They get together again, because opposites-still-very-much-attract, and in the process each gives up something very important to them for the sake of making their now-monogamous relationship work.Woven into the story are funny scenes that depict the awkward tinder negotiations, awkward logistics of group sex (really, there is nothing porny about this movie), and drama-drama-drama that one could foresee any attempt at opening an LGBTQ(letters-letters-maybe-a-2?-letters)-specific museum.
You may be absolutely right about the marketing of the move. I wouldn't know, I have not seen anything other than a trailer before we went to see it.
Even if it's a reasonably good movie, it's got niche appeal. "Starring gay actors who are attractive to gay men" is not the same as "starring actors who are attractive to women playing gay characters, whether or not the actor is gay or non-binary or whatever", so that kind of movie is going to have a much smaller potential audience.
Put Timothée Chalamet (ugh) into a gay romcom, and you're going to have a lot more girls wanting to go see it, and so a lot more guys bringing their dates/being dragged along by their girlfriends going to see it.
Oh, I agree with your premise! Where we disagree is on whether the casting already accomplished this goal. Luke MacFarlane is a hottie and played the role of conflicted boyfriend especially well. Billy Eichner is no Timothée Chalamet, but rom-coms frequently have the
girlmain protagonist not be conventionally beautiful. Which was important to the plot.If I were in charge of marketing this movie... it would probably tank harder, because I don't know the first thing about marketing. But Monday-night arm-chair quarterbacking is as American as Apple Pie, so:
I would market it hard to young heterosexual women, with lots of hints to suggest that they can use this movie as a potential litmus test on whether their date is willing to signal openness to leftie liberal ideals regarding sexuality. Since the movie's ultimate morality lesson is about monogamous commitment, the date's response to that would also be useful.
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I’m not homophobic in any way, but I’m not interested in this movie because I’m just…not gay.
Other movie genres I’m not interested in: marvel movies, children’s movies (although I repeat myself, HA!), movies where old people get their groove back, sports drama movies (except Rudy), slasher/gore movies, anime…I don’t know I’m sure there are many others. My point is that while I don’t have any problem with gay people, I’m not gay myself and won’t seek out gay media in the same way I don’t seek out gay bars.
If a friend invited me to go see this movie, I would go, but again I don’t think then would because I’m not in the target audience.
Target audience for this movie is about 10% of the total population, or about 5% since only men. Meaning this movie if Herero would have done about $200M in sales.
Target a tiny audience and get a tiny box office. Simple as.
Surely the target audience must have been imagined to be primarily fujoshi-adjacent straight women, and not gay men?
Well it missed that audience as well... straight women want the gay experience catered to their tastes, they want a nicholas sparks novel or rom-com where they get to drool over both leads, and it feels slightly taboo. Brokeback Mountain hit this audience perfectly.
They don't want a movie named after a frat term of endeerment and that conotes jock humour... There is stuff like that but that's usually compromise fair like American Pie, Neighbors, etc. that Exists to straddle the line of mixed company where several straight friends might be together and female tastes won't dominate.
They alienated the female audience with "Bros" and male audiences with "Gay"
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I think activists would still loudly declare you homophobic. Being straight is OK, but your inability to move past the gayness and enjoy the movie is problematic. It's unacceptable to go around saying, "I like straight romcoms but not gay romcoms" for the same reasons one can't say, "I like cis-women but not trans-women."
We should distinguish media made about X from media made for X. If a niche piece of media is made for say, black people, I could envision "cultural appropriation" complaints if too many white people start enjoying it. OTOH, blackwashing batman isn't about making media for black people, it's about making media about black people, for everyone (mostly white people) to watch.
Back to Bros, this movie is about gays, but is for everyone. It's alright if the only way a straight person to enjoy this is to mentally replace the characters with ones that appeal to them. Indeed, maybe audiences already do that when watching straight romcoms (maybe you don't like their hair color?). But watching a relationship between two men is probably too weird and distracting that people probably find it difficult to make the mental substitutions (probably for me, too).
I think when it comes to charges of "homophobia" the only time you're ever allowed to treat gay and straight differently is in matters of orientation, which is to say, you wouldn't date a gay person if you're straight. Even then, you'd probably have to phrase it pretty carefully.
Is he actually saying that he likes straight but not gay romcoms? I read him as apathetic to the genre, with BROS giving no reason to buck the trend.
I don’t think “activists” would label the latter stance as homophobic...
Yeah. I don't like romcoms, so I'm not going to go see one, and I'm particularly not going to go see one where I'm lectured about how I have to go see it or else I'm an -ist or a -phobe.
Hm, avoid spending time and money to be bored out of my skull watching a movie that doesn't appeal to me and wouldn't appeal to me if it had straight male and female leads, all for the low, low cost of being called a homophobe? I'll take that bargain!
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Probably worse than that, since I think generally LGB is estimated at 3-5% of the population, so it’s really more like…2.5% on the high end?
I’m aware that a higher % of people engage in same-sex behaviors (but i think still less than 10%) but it isn’t a core part of their identity, ergo, not likely to be motivated in particular to watch this.
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When you talked about how the title may have put people off, I thought you were gonna say that the word "Bro" made people think the movie was about dudebro assholes. I do have to wonder how much just the title alone (i.e. no summaries or trailers or posters or whatever) influence watching decisions, though, because that might not be a good enough explanation.
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I really don't think this is a thing. Everyone I know is a young urban progressive, and many of them are the conspicuously political type of young urban progressive. While they all liked to talk about how covid was terrifying and we needed vax mandates - both in person and on social media - most of them stopped caring after less than 12 months.
We are way beyond that point now, and I don't know a single "young urban progressive" who avoids going to rowdy parties. Maybe they wear a mask on public transport to that party, but that's it. Most of them will happily share a joint with strangers at said parties. None of them are concerned about covid in a way that would stop them from going to a public event they had any interest in.
If young urban progressives didn't show up to this movie, its because they, like everyone else, was not interested in the movie. Not because of covid concerns.
My personal observation is that almost everyone I still see wearing a mask in public transport or while shopping is a senior citizen or a middle-aged person that seems obviously sickly. This might be because the current Finnish covid policy is very much guided protection aimed at those groups, though - I'm not sure if they are specifically encouraged to wear masks, but at least the fourth vaccine booster is not generally even available to people who are under 60 and don't belong to the risk groups.
In general, the people who went hardest for zero covid narratives were mostly (expections apply) young urban progressives but older centrists, "pillar-of-the-society" types. Young urban progressives mostly tailed this group - many of them got quite vocally anti-anti-vaxx, but even there this was an expressive frustration about perceived far-righters and hopes that a vaxx-first strategy would prevent lockdowns. The great majority of young urban progressives I know (ie most of my friend circle) ditched the masks quite early on and hasn't really cared about Covid at all for a long time, especially after winter-spring 2022 when everyone and their mother finally actually got Covid.
One general problem with the "Covid discourse" here is that people still continue to shove the Covid culture war into simplistic progressive/congressive boxes when the whole thing always was rather more nuanced than that.
I wonder how many of those people are like my husband, who wears a mask to stave off the chance of smelling perfumes and cleaning fragrances. He gets bad sinus headaches that last for days from artificial fragrances and he is very happy that now he has a normalized excuse for wearing a mask in public.
The typical mask cannot block these. If you're not smelling them because you are wearing a mask, that's either because you are rebreathing your own exhaled air (bad) or mouthbreathing due to added mechanical difficulty of pushing air past the mask (also bad). On the rare occasions I have worn a mask, it is indeed the latter that happened. I noticed I couldn't smell things, and then noticed the reason why is that I started breathing through my mouth.
Why is breathing through your mouth supposed to be bad? TBH that's just how I have breathed my entire life, I have never been able to get proper air flow through my nose.
Your nose has filters to remove (some of) the particulate matter in incoming air before it gets to your lungs. This is then ejected in snot - if you spend enough time in a polluted environment your snot will be black.
Interesting. Kind of a shame my nose has never really let me breathe properly, then.
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This is my experience as well. I think I know one yuppie (out of dozens) who masks in public barring unusual circumstances like "has a big international trip planned next week."
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Honestly if I had heard of that movie before its release, I would have assumed "Bros" meant like frat brothers, I'd guess it was an American Pie-like comedy.
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I agree with this and your other statements in the thread.
And I also want to note that Eichner (known as that guy with the obnoxious voice from Parks and Rec?) is not bringing the level of charisma that a typical romantic lead of either gender has to have for a typical rom-com. There is no movie he could star in that would do well. I think there could possibly be a gay rom-com that women would be willing to see, but it would have to be a traditional rom-com script (not preachy, not sexual) and cute, charismatic actors that we already like.
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Women love fiction that is notionally about gay men, though, it seems like this movie was just bad or badly marketed.
I think you’re confusing “most people who enjoy gay fiction are women” with “most women enjoy gay fiction”. The former is likely, since there are many more women than gay men, the latter is untrue in my experience.
It is notable that a lot of gay fiction is actively offputting to gay men, though, because it’s written pretty explicitly for women.
There is a big difference between slash and yaoi, and gay fiction written for gay men by gay men.
There's been some pushback about this already from gay men and others, and it's been a topic of discussion ever since slash came out of Star Trek fanzines into wider fandom. 'Gay' characters in slash, which is primarily written by women, can often be 'women in drag' - they speak, act, think, behave and emote like women (or teenage/young women) rather than men.
Whole other ball of wax. A gay movie that's by guys for guys is not likely to be something that will appeal to women, even slash fans.
Yeah, I agree.
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This is my explanation too. Or perhaps that + the increasing non-viability of romcoms in theaters in general as so much moves to streaming. If that's true in general, it was deeply unwise to make a fringe gay movie in the same genre.
You honestly can't take progressives at their word cause heterosexual males are an "acceptable target" for whining compared to women, so they tend to pepper in them or some other group into their complaints to show they're still good allies.
See Ethan Klein complaining that white supremacists were responsible for him being banned from Twitter for making anti-semitic jokes or Lindsey Ellis complaining about white men when she was cancelled by her own colleagues, many of whom were female
It's just a progressive reflex at this point, especially since we've normalized progressive works and artists whining about the media or public reaction.
I hate that Lindsey Ellis gave up on her interesting public work (making youtube videos) because of stupidity on twitter. Just leave twitter!
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You may be shocked by the lopsided demographics of yaoi, gay fanfiction, homoerotic vampires, and gay fanfiction about homoerotic vampires. Romance for women often does better without including a cute actress that might make the audience feel inadequate.
It's just that they're not attracted to "bromances", but standard male-female relationships with a non-threatening sensitive boy standing in for a woman. So brokeback mountain probably scored much better with them than this did.
A point i feel like people sometimes miss in these discussions is how weird yaoi/boys love is. It isn't just gay rom-coms, it is essentially porn, regardless of whether there is any actual sex or not.
One obvious aspect of this is that the characters clearly aren't male, just like women in porn aren't really female.
This is often kind of the case in regular rom-coms as well characters being so idealised but in Boys love it's turned up to 11 and humanity is left behind.
Could you expand on this point?
Female sexuality is about being defensive, elusive and making men chase after them - to catch the best, most dedicated fish in the sea. Female porn actresses are depicted somewhere along the spectrum from 'sexually aggressive' to 'total slut'.
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Average for America, perhaps, but he is Hollywood ugly. Under-discussed possible reason for the flop.
Yes, sorry, Billy. Billy isn’t Woody Allen ugly either, but Call Me By Your Name did well for two reasons.
Harry Styles should have been in this instead of that weird Stepford Wives remake.
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This needs to be emphasized more. Other gay movies like Brokeback did fine. If Ledger and Gyngenhall or someone with the same stature and looks had been the two leads, this film wouldn’t have flopped. Also Eichner is apparently divisive even within the gay community (many find him irritating.)
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My priors were strongly in the opposite direction, at least in the fanfiction space, so I checked the numbers on Archive of our Own, (the most popular fanfiction site).
They confirmed my suspicions: M/M pairings are almost twice as common as M/F (4.7 million fics vs 2.4 million). They're also read a lot more, the most popular M/M fic had 8.2 million hits vs only 2.7 million for the top M/F fic.
I think he's probably right if you count all romantic fiction. Outside of the fanfic niche, iirc the genre of Amazon self-published romance/sex novels is weighted more towards heterosexual stuff.
But yeah, within fandom-specific communities it's a cockslide in favor of gay stuff.
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When I was watching the trailer, I was really enjoying it. I got a really 90s/early 00s feeling from the dialogue. But then it got to the blowjob scene, and that was extremely off-putting.
Anyways, I wouldn't describe this as a RomCom, but instead as a SexCom. It's produced by Judd Apatow, and most of Judd's work is SexComs labelled as RomComs. SexComs are raunchy, typically aimed at younger dudes, usually peppered with attractive women, lots of sex jokes and innuendo. You're getting horny guys to come out and see hot chicks and comedy. Judd Apatow has slowly blended more romance into his sexcoms, and let off the gas a bit on the sex, too, making them a bit more palatable for general audiences. But there's a reason we're seeing Megan Fox get her tits massaged by another woman, and it isn't 'romance'.
With Bros, this formula isn't going to work. You're not going to draw in horny straight guys. Your average woman isn't going to be sexually attracted to the idea of this. Horny gay guys don't need to see a movie, they can just go and get a blowjob. So there's no real audience here.
And it's not really a romcom. Not for a general audience. You could swap the sex of the leading person in most romcoms and have to do almost no rewrites to the plot or dialogue. Maybe the odd joke won't make sense. But for the most part RomComs are completely neutral on sexuality. But you can't even do this with Bros. The film would not make sense if the lead was a woman. The story is so tied to sexuality that it cannot be romantic for the majority of the population.
I can imagine why Eichner is so pissed about this. He's seen woke/gay shit getting pumped up and celebrated for the past few years, and he saw this as his ticket. Bet he had a piece of the pie on this and was expecting it to do $60+ million, and he'd be getting a chunk of that. Probably thought he'd be collecting awards, the media would be fawning over him, and he'd be the gay Apatow. And in one weekend that was blown out. Like getting 6 out of 7 numbers in the lottery, and then finding out a dozen other people did, as well. Birthday numbers. lol
As for the incest thing, I don't know how many would think that. I find the title a bit weird, but presumably it's based more on 'bros before hoes'. But even then I think many would be put off by it, as usually people see their 'bros' as being in the friend zone. Maybe Eichner, being a YouTuber, spent too much time online, and sees 'bros' in the context of "BROJOB BROJOB! CHOO CHOO"
I watched the trailer and it just seemed... tryhard? Like the intent is not telling a story or entertaining people, it's going through an assignment called "make a gay romcom that is clearly GAY but also clearly a ROMCOM". Like they're going through a TVTropes list that doesn't even exist, or something.
Also, the trailer seems to place politics front and center, right from the start, and I'd imagine someone who actually wants to watch a romcom (or a sexcom, or whatever) would be turned off by that.
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Even from a gay porn perspectives, "bros" is more something that'd be tied to straight-to-gay or pay4gay muscleheads, mostly, hence the brojob joke (not-joke). Maybe some overlap with the wrestling-as-foreplay, which... uh, definitely popular for gay dudes. Though I'd still consider it more associated with weightlifting or gym bunnies.
(("Bros being bros" has 37 hits on e621; not a single one has incest in it, compared to multiple guys watching porn together. This is kinda cute, and at least SFW in the sense it doesn't have anyone's junk showing.))
I guess that explains Lords of the Locker Room?
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That link was just a honeypot to find out who here has a furaffinity account to see loginwalled pics, wasn't it?
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I hadn't even heard of "Bros" - I suspect lack of knowledge on the part of the public is more likely to be the reason for its failure than anything else.
You might be right that on the margins, people subconsciously thought of incest instead of "gay romcom" when they saw the marketing, but they had to see the marketing first. My guess is the lack of star power led to the studios marketing it less, and less people being super excited to see it ahead of time.
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Brokebuck Mountain making $178 mill on an $11 mill budget way back in the 00s suggests there was an audience for watching gay cowboys eat pudding, or at least Heath Ledger's ass.
(Edit: wait, phrasi--ah, nevermind, you're good)
But I remember a lot of people going to see that movie as an Important Statement, and gays being aggressively homosexual isn't much of a Statement to activate that audience with any more. The same people these days are probably going to see Black Panther 2: Wakandan Boogaloo instead, or whatever the independent film equivalent is. (Or as you say, still making an Important COVID Statement by not going at all)
For anyone who follows film stuff: have there been any breakout successes like B.M. lately? What were the themes if so?
I couldn't avoid any of the "Call Me By Your Name" stuff on Tumblr, that's a gay romance that seems to have been wildly popular, but I don't know how it did at the boxoffice.
Thank you, Wikipedia:
So the recipe for successful gay romance movie seems to be: (1) adapt a literary work, be it short story or novel (2) have hot young actors that appeal to women (3) have some angst in it, even if the ending is eventually happy(ish) (4) exotic locale - sheepherding in Texas, an Italian villa
Not that handsome 44 year old abrasive guy in a comedy set in New York doesn't seem to fit the bill. Eichner might have done better if his actor's vanity had allowed him to step back and just co-write the script/produce the movie, but it had much younger, much hotter guys in the lead roles.
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Brokeback Mountain was seen as having serious artistic cred and was trendy to see as a result. It also had Gyllenhaal, a much bigger star than anyone in this movie.
It was also more than a decade and a half ago, and the entire structure of the movie business has changed; streaming has introduced a lot more competition for eyeballs. Movies like that - and Bros- now more often end up on streaming instead of hoovering up the huge box office.
Sure, absolutely. But I think at the very least the success of Brokeback Mountain proves that the reason Bros didn't do well is more complex than the lazy "people are bigots" excuse that Eichman reached for.
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Brokeback Mountain is a tragic drama rather than a romantic comedy, so it's probably not the right movie to use as a comparison. Love, Simon is a romantic comedy, and seems to have done reasonably well. (I saw it myself, albeit not in theatres, and it was cute! I liked it). Maybe the fact that this was a gay romance wasn't actually particularly relevant to its success one way or the other.
I'd also bring up Magic Mike and Magic Mike XXL: while the characters are het, the films are incredibly androphillic, and especially XXL had a pretty large male audience. They're both somewhat blends of drama and comedy (if more heavy on drama in the first, which has a drug overdose and ecstasy smuggling as a subplot), but they're also pretty overt sex comedies, complete with a lengthy shot framed by a guy's dick in a penis pump, or a character's main character trait being his big dick and character arc focusing on him finding a partner who can fit it.
I think the broader economic situation didn't help, but Bros also faltered because it wasn't quite sure what it was trying to be. The success of shows like Queer Eye or Love, Simon point to some broad audience appeal, and anyone who's dealt with Community Drama knows that there's a lot of matters that could be generally interesting and (sometimes morbidly) humorous, and Venture Bros points to a pretty wide tolerance for even fairly raunchy and gross gay humor if it's not too explicit. And, on the flip side, there's definitely audiences for gay-specific films, with a lot of the community-from-within jokes or overt sexual appeal. But they'd be two different types of films.
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I've not seen either movie, but I expect what the difference is what the difference always is:
A good story that happens to have woke elements vs. A woke story for wokeness sake.
Juno, to come from the other side, is not an anti-abortion story, but it has an anti-abortion scene wherein Juno realizes her baby has fingernails already. And she realizes she could not possibly kill a person with fingernails.
Juno seemed like they wanted to do a teen pregnancy movie but had to figure out a reason why she wouldn't do the "obvious" thing and just get an abortion. The solution was that scene where the weirdly pro-life Asian classmate stumbles onto the cheat code to manipulate the quirky art chick, "Your baby has fingernails!"
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Joker grossed a billion off an estimated budget of $55 million. That's a much bigger budget but a similar ratio.
There haven't been many (any?) movies like that since 2020, and box office grosses are way down from pre-covid, though there have been a good number of movies that gross 300+ million globally on 40 million budgets.
I had somehow totally forgotten about Joker. What a trip that memecycle was. Still never saw it.
It was a pretty decent art house film, imho.
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