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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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