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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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