Come and pay to see my movie, you closed-minded homophobes
Scolding potential audiences won't make your movie a hit.
Is Bros a good movie? With a 91% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, it might very well be. I may check it out when it arrives on Netflix or one of the fifteen other streaming services.
Well, I’ll add it to the queue of unwatched movies and shows, anyway. Gone are the days when I used to buy DVDs and let them pile up, unwatched. I guess having all-you-can-watch services for one monthly fee saves a little money. But I digress.
Despite the good reviews, it opened with only $4.8 million at the box office this weekend. The glass half-full way of looking at it is that a gay romantic comedy starring open gay actors but no major A-list star,1 would never have opened wide, been marketed to mainstream audiences and earned even that much not too long ago. I give the studio credit for swinging for the fences and trying something bold.
Alas, it didn’t work. Were there just too many homophobes out there, keeping the movie down?
Well, maybe. A world in which someone like Marjorie Taylor Greene can get elected to office is not one which has completely conquered prejudice against gay people. But The Hollywood Reporter notes that the past few years have been tough on theatrically released R-rated comedies in general:
Of late, comedies that have worked at the box office have been upheld by major star power, such as Ryan Reynolds in Free Guy (20th Century/Disney) or Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum in The Lost City (Paramount). Comedy has many sub-genres, and both of those films are also action-adventure.
Universal will follow quickly with another rom-com, Ticket to Paradise, starring Julia Roberts and George Clooney. The movie opens domestically Oct. 21 after already amassing a solid $45 million overseas.
In terms of more raunchy fare, Apatow’s recent career trajectory points to how tough the landscape has become for R-rated comedies, such as Bros. He directed his most recent, The Bubble, for Netflix, though in March he inked an overall deal with Universal, suggesting he will return to helming theatrical comedies.
A smaller-scale movie like Bros has an uphill battle bringing people back to theaters in a post-COVID world. If it had opened in limited release and let good word of mouth build up, it might have done better in the long run.
More than anything, if Eichner’s tweets are any indication, many potential moviegoers may felt like they were being ordered to eat their vegetables. Hinting that you’re a good person if you see the movie, and a bad person if you don’t, sure won’t make me rush to the theater on opening weekend. If anything it might make me look for a pirated copy on principle, even if it turned up on Netflix.
It’s the same reason CBC television (in English-speaking Canada, at least) gets beaten by infomercials in the ratings, and why once-funny (or never funny) preachy late-night TV hosts are getting destroyed in the ratings by the unfunny but at least non-preachy Greg Gutfeld.2
Bros might be as un-woke as Animal House (anyone who thinks all gay people are “woke” has not met many actual gay people) but if people suspect otherwise, that’s the kiss of death for any movie.
That said, some of my favorite comedies of all time - UHF, Hudson Hawk, Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story - flopped spectacularly at the box office but eventually found their audience. If Bros is as funny as Billy Eichner insists, it will stand the test of time.3
In other cinema news, I’m laying a marker down right now:
This will be the most-watched Netflix original Christmas movie of all time. Maybe the most watched original Netflix movie of all time, regardless of genre. I’m going to watch it, and so are you, because a Lindsey Lohan renaissance would be the feel-good story we desperately need right now.
If NPH had starred instead of Billy Eichner, an actor most people are just vaguely aware of if they’ve heard of him at all, I bet it would have done much better. Not Avatar or even Avatar re-release numbers, but at least a million or two more on opening weekend.
Give Gutfeld and Fox News credit: they found a niche for a late-night show that isn’t always beating you over the head about how awful Donald Trump and the GOP are (which they are, but even I don’t want to be reminded of it constantly) and exploited the heck out of it. Years from now we’ll look back and wonder why the Trump era, which should have been a golden age for late-night talk shows, pretty much destroyed the genre altogether.
Well, maybe. I’m still waiting for Quick Change, the only film (co-) directed by Bill Murray, to get the attention it deserves. In a truly just world it would be as popular and beloved as Groundhog Day.