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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.
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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