12
votes
Why did Billy Eichner’s ‘Bros’ bomb at the box office? Straight people aren’t entirely to blame
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- Authors
- Zack Sharf,William Earl
- Published
- Oct 3 2022
- Word count
- 1247 words
If your main selling point on anything is "Look how historic it will be," and not "qualities of thing itself," it's going to be seen as polishing a turd, regardless if the thing is quality or not.
Narratives like this, that end with "my film failed because of homophobes and bigots" (especially phrased as 'straight people') in turn gives bigots ammo about agendas being shoved down their throats.
I feel much the same about Ghostbusters 2016. I felt it was a bleh film, but not for the reasons the bigots said.
And ditto for Hillary Clinton's "I'm with Her." Complete with calling non-supporters bigots and/or Trump supporters.
I personally love Billy's content...but it's also squarely in the realm of "I'll watch this if/when its streaming and I'm bored."
It is fascinating that there are still people trying to do this mid-to-late 2010s style marketing that has never worked once.
It worked for "Black Panther." Though it helps that the discourse around that movie extended beyond just the historicalness of it. On the other hand, I think it would have gotten a lot more flack for its atrocious CGI and fight choreography if not for the historic elements.
The article actually mentions Black Panther as an exception. Although that is a Marvel movie, so it wasn’t its only selling point just by the nature of the franchise and the fact that it was preceding Infinity War. Though for sure the demographic it was representing came out in droves to support it.
I'm very confused because I just saw the trailer for this movie and I wasn't aware Billy Eichner was capable of not being angry on camera.
Also, it is a bad sign when a comedy doesn't have enough good jokes to fill 3 minutes.
Maybe he should have been angry? I love angry Billy Eichner. He's like gay Gilbert Gottfried. What's wrong with that?
I'm gay. I like Billy Eichner's On The Street videos.
That said, I also can't imagine him not being angry. While I enjoy Billy Eichner in 5 minute shorts, I don't think I can handle watching two hours of angry Billy Eichner.
The casting wasn't right; they should have chosen a different actor.
Also: two white gay men in a gayborhood doing two-white-gay-men-in-a-gayborhood stuff isn't very interesting.
That’d be hard to do considering Eichner wrote this as a vehicle for himself
Up the count from two White gay men to four and you've got gay "Sex and the City."
I did notice a similarity to "Sex and the City". An "it was edgy in the 90s" kind of vibe.
Oh no! The only thing worse than aging badly after a decade or two is aging badly when you're brand new.
To be fair, actual Sex and the City didn't age that badly. The acting is top-notch, the editing is fun, the situations amusing, and the romcom core is basically eternal and universal. It is not edgy, though. And Just Like That... has a hard time with the comedy aspect, though. A group of friends living through their 50s can certainly be funny, but in a very different way that I don't think the show was able to capture.
TBH I've never watched it that closely I've mostly just soaked it up by osmosis because it's in a rotation between Gilmore Girls, The Office, and Girls of shows my wife keeps running in the background all day. I think by this point I've seen or overheard all of it, but in disjointed bits and pieces.
As an aside, of these, I actually feel like Girls comes out looking the best. There's some bottle episodes that I find really really well written and even the average episode tends to be decent at worst except for some lumpiness in the penultimate season. I hate to do it, but I gotta hand it to Lena Dunham.
So Girls is from 2012, Sex and the City was released in 1998. They are 14 years apart. In terms of the evolution of TV, they represent very different eras.
I think most people would say that Girls has aged pretty badly. At least from a social perspective, but it is representative of the mumble-core that went away relatively quickly (of which Dunham is still trying to make movies in that style to little fanfare).
Fun fact about Girls, that was a show that a lot of casting directors really liked. Which is a reason why Adam Driver became so famous.
Well yeah it really captures the vibe of the period well.