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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.
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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