I'm almost the target market for Bros. And by that I mean that my most played song for the last couple of weeks has been MUNA's cover of Britney Spears' "Sometimes" which I saw in the film Fire...
Exemplary
I'm almost the target market for Bros.
And by that I mean that my most played song for the last couple of weeks has been MUNA's cover of Britney Spears' "Sometimes" which I saw in the film Fire Island, which I watched before I even knew Bros existed because, even though I don't watch a whole lot of movies these days, the ones I do tend to be gay-interest films.
The problem with The Discourse surrounding Bros and Eichner's viral tweets, as I see it, is that everything that I have seen about this film feels completely out of touch to me as your everyday, average gay guy.
Let's start off with the the box office take: $4.8 million on opening weekend.
Yes, I understand that by Hollywood standards that's a bomb. The movie had a $22 million budget and $30 million for marketing. This movie will not break even.
However, going on a rant that something ONLY made $5 MILLION dollars is so out of touch with the world right now -- where everything is increasingly expensive and seemingly nobody has enough money -- that it's almost insulting. I just put through a refund of the $6,000 I paid in student loans post-pandemic pause so that those can get forgiven, and that sudden $6,000 that I'm going to get is a HUGE sum of money to me.
Furthermore, even having access to the kind of resources that can afford to spend $22+30 million dollars on you is unignorably huge. I spent ~$100 of my own money for classroom supplies and got some grant money for a comparable amount. I am grateful for that grant money. If someone decided that I and my colleagues were worth spending millions on, my position would be one of gratitude and deliberate humility.
Furthermore, I'm not going to lose sleep when a movie doesn't make back its millions when teachers like me, nationwide, still have to buy their own school supplies. That smacks of injustice; a movie flopping does not.
This sentiment is, admittedly, completely out of touch with how the film industry works though. The film studio didn't spend all that money out of kindness or a principled thoughtfulness -- they spent it in an effort to make more. When we are getting chastized by people who spent $22+30 million dollars in an effort to get even more dollars, it feels ethically vacant -- morally hollow. The vibe I get is "we dumped a fat chunk of change into commodifying your identity and it failed to meet our expected returns". The "how dare THE STRAIGHTS" sense that followed from that feels like it's attempting to launder cold monetary greed through the warmth of the queer community, and I resent when the thing I love most about my community is leveraged in such a negative way.
To then pin the film's financial failure specifically on homophobia specifically is, again, completely out of touch. Making five million is what we're calling a failure these days, and being anti-gay is... choosing not to watch a romantic comedy? We have come so far as a society if that's the dominant way prejudice is manifesting itself, but I can go ahead and say that the homophobia I have faced and continue to face doesn't look like the indictments Bros Discourse is dishing out.
If homophobia did impact its returns, it's far more likely that it's because a lot of gay people who wanted to see the film didn't because they would have to do so publicly in their local community. I live in a place currently where I could walk into a showing of it without an ounce of discomfort, but if I traveled, right now, to where I grew up, I would not feel safe going to see that movie in theaters.
The long legacy of queer media that predates Bros owes a lot of its success, acclaim, and reach to being able to be enjoyed at home, privately and safely. Eichner turned up his nose at streaming, but part of the reason LGBT-content has been so successful in that domain is that queer people can consume it without outing themselves or putting themselves in harm's way.
And before streaming there was piracy. When Brokeback Mountain released there was absolutely no way that I was going to go see that in theaters where I lived, but I definitely downloaded it and watched it at the time. I was in college, sharing a dorm room with another guy. I had to wait until he went home for the weekend to watch it without fear of him finding out, but even then I was on edge, worried that he might suddenly come back at any moment, open the door, and walk in on my secret.
Who knows how he would have responded if he did, but it almost certainly wouldn't have been good. It possibly would have been violent. I say that because after I did come out publicly in that area I was subjected to threats of violence and a few very close calls.
That's the kind of homophobia I'm used to, and it has thankfully thawed to the point that Eichner can now look at straight people responding to Bros with indifference and use the exact same word to describe that phenomenon. It's simultaneously a comment on how far we've come as a society but also, I feel, a dilution of the term on Eichner's part.
The film's creators keep talking about its reviews, CinemaScore, and positive screenings, but they don't seem satisfied that they made what they believe to be a good movie. Isn't that something worth celebrating in its own right? Isn't that what makes the film, as a film, more noteworthy than its returns?
I'll side-step here for a moment to say that I think Eichner's tweets are possibly doing two things that mean we can't necessarily take them at face value. I mentioned in a shitty hot take a few days ago (that I have regretted posting ever since because I don't want to be someone on the internet who posts hot takes anymore) that I think Eichner was drumming up publicity for his film. At the time I posted it, I was picturing Eichner as being pressured by people who were wanting their millions back, so of course he was going to say whatever was going to get attention, get in news cycles, and keep people talking about Bros.
That's possibly the case, and it did get a lot of press, but in thinking about it, I've also come to realize that Eichner very well could be trying to play defense for queer actors and creators in Hollywood. A lot of people higher up than him are very likely unhappy about how the movie was received, and by publicly and vocally pinning the movie's failure on straight people, he might be attempting to inhibit studios' reluctance to pick up LGBT-forward projects in the future. I can get on board with that, because despite me disliking the current stance of "Bros deserved to be a financial hit", I definitely don't want that "failure" to negatively impact related queer content in the future. One of the ways homophobia might actually play out for this film is that it'll unfairly become the yardstick by which all other gay or queer projects are judged and it'll thus have a chilling effect on future LGBT content.
Regardless of Eichner's intentions, however, Bros still fails to capture the queer zeitgeist in the way that it thinks that it's doing -- another thing that casts it as out of touch.
One of the complaints about Queer as Folk when it aired was that it captured a very narrow slice of gay life -- primarily white, wealthy, attractive, city-dwelling, club-going gays -- and that was on the air in the late 90s and early 2000s -- two decades ago. We've been having the same debates and criticisms about our media ever since, with plenty of additional content in the same vein, which makes Bros feel a bit lazy rather than landmark. It's not an entirely fair complaint (no one gay title should have to represent the entire gay community, and being a white wealthy attractive city-dwelling club-going gay is a valid way to be), but also many of us are interested in exploring things other than that one archetype.
Furthermore, the warmth of the queer community is inclusivity, but the types of people depicted in Bros are often some of the people that most vocally violate those precepts. Hyper-fit masculine gay guys are often extremely exclusionary and judgmental. Just because gay people are a marginalized minority does not mean we can't further some of the same discriminations in our own community. Body shaming, toxic masculinity, and racism aren't just common in some gay circles -- they're almost givens. "No fats, femmes, or Asians" used to be something you'd commonly see on online dating profiles and hookup apps, which is something that manages to hit a veritable major chord of discrimination in six short words.
The film is seemingly aware of this -- Eichner's character can't believe that the beefy Luke Macfarlane's character is actually interested in him (despite Eichner being very fit himself). The main plot seems to hinge on the idea that Macfarlane isn't a judgmental asshole, which only works if his character exists among a cultural backdrop of people like him that are. Maybe the film actually does more with this besides what's shown in the trailer (despite all I've written on the movie, I've only seen the trailer, so a lot of what I'm saying in this entire post isn't fair in that regard), but on the surface, this looks like yet another gay film without anybody I can really identify with and with portraits of gay people that look like some of those people who have actually made gay life harder for people like me and people who are fat or femme or Asian, etc.
I know that comparing Bros to Fire Island is passe at this point, but the latter had a small touch that I liked. Bowen Yang's character, in most (maybe all?) of the movie, keeps his shirt on. It sounds like a minor thing, but in a movie that features gratutious shirtlessness about a gay community filled with gratuitous shirtlessness, it was nice to see a consistently clothed character. This particular styling choice is used to contrast Yang's character with Joel Kim Booster's character who is almost always topless and reinforce the two as friends but foils, but I liked it because I'm a gay guy who, well, keeps my shirt on.
I'm a Bowen, not a Joel.
Some of that's because of my own body issues; some of that is because I'm not a sculpted Adonis; and some of that is because some of those sculpted Adonises feel they have license to be complete assholes to people like me who've got bad skin, no visible muscles, and a paunch.
I can't fault Bros specifically for casting a very attractive lead for a role that's supposed to be unattractive (because that's how literally every rom-com out there works), but I can fault it for trying to position itself as a progressive bastion when it comes across as rather pedestrian. If I'm feeling, overall, THIS out-of-touch with the film as a gay guy, why would straight people go see it? What are my lesbian friends going to get from the film? What about my trans friends who probably aren't feeling the lighthearted side of being LGBT right now because they're in ongoing fights for their lives, rights, and dignity?
The producer in the article calls the film "fun", "funny", and "silly" -- and that's fine -- but many people -- straight and queer people alike -- aren't necessarily feeling fun, funny, or silly about things right now.
I'll probably watch Bros when it hits streaming, but I'm not going to indict anybody who doesn't see it -- whether on the big screen or their home ones. Also, I kind of hate that it has pulled focus in the way that it has, because I hate watching pile-ons and backlash in general, and it stings for me in particularly resonant way when the target is queer people, which is hypocritical because I'm literally contributing to that pile-on right now. Ultimately I think there are just so many better things we could be focusing on and putting our energies towards.
I called the movie out of touch in this post, but ultimately I think it's the response to the movie that has revealed a sort of separate out-of-touchness. The movie compelled me to write my first shitty hot take here in a while -- years, maybe? And that's not who I want to be. I joined Tildes to get away from stuff like that.
Furthermore, writing at the length I have about this kind of thing is... not normal or healthy or a good use of my time? I kind of hate the part of me that felt compelled to say something when I simply could have chosen not to.
I realize this is me sandbagging myself and every previous paragraph of this post, but ultimately I feel like the healthiest response to Bros is to see it if you're interested, don't see it if you don't want to, and talk about it as you would any other film.
That's it.
Not one of my queer friends has even mentioned Bros in our conversations. Were it not for the online blowback, I wouldn't even know this movie exists. This move has no real-world footprint for me.
The way that everything has spiraled out of control online is, I feel, just a distortion of the internet, and I need to work on not being part of that distortion.
I was actually doing pretty good with that here for a while, I thought, but this pushed its way through.
To be honest, I just kind of can't stand movies anymore. So much about them frustrates me, and the fact that so much of what gets reported about them is related to money is one of the primary...
To be honest, I just kind of can't stand movies anymore. So much about them frustrates me, and the fact that so much of what gets reported about them is related to money is one of the primary reasons that set me off. There's this idea that you must see a movie on it's opening weekend or it's somehow wasted, and I honestly don't see any way that is a natural idea that people have - the only reason why anyone would benefit from that other than overhyped nerds who can't control themselves is that the studios and distributors take the majority of your ticket money in that period. Fuck that; I'm going to see the movie when it's convenient to me, and I'm not going to stick myself in a room full of annoying people who may or may not have COVID.
The other thing that bugs me about movies these days is the focus on super expensive movies with absurdly expensive marketing campaign to get people to see them. They're made for the lowest common denominator, and so often they over-explain some concept so much that I keep finding myself sitting there thinking "they think I'm an idiot, don't they?" They are basically live-action rollercoaster footage, except there are so many special effects that it makes you wonder why they even bother to use real actors anymore. And to make matters worse, the way special effects people are hired is so backwards that they can win major awards for their work and yet go bankrupt doing them. And this entire process means that the actual quality of the movie doesn't really matter; even if a movie is hated by audiences enough people will go to them that they make their money back.
I don't think that I'm the only one who is starting to feel really disenchanted by movies lately. It used to be that Netflix and other streaming services spent a lot of time and money making actual feature-length films, but now it's really rare for them to risk it because nobody seems interested in them anymore. There's a movie I saw recently called Lost Ollie I wanted to bring up to some people, but then I realized that they actually released it as a limited series instead.
I'm going to ignore most of the controvercy around Bros and how Eichner and the producers reacted to the lukewarm reception because I've smelled smelled the oncoming drama and thus have been specifically avoiding it. I will say that I think that they were way too optimistic to be able to draw that kind of crowd. Yes, I know Eichner is well loved even among straights, but I think it was naive to think that they could get enough straight audience to buy into watching a movie about the world as seen by gay men. That's as far as I'll go on that topic, though.
What I will say is that I think that movies featuring gay men have the tendency to be kind of ... simple? It's kind of hard to put these feelings into words. @kfwyre is right to bring up that a lot of queer media tends to focus on very specific groups of people, and while I'd agree that I'm tired of watching perfect white man problems, I don't think that's the only problem. It seems that movies that feature gay people tend to be kind of shoved into the genre of romantic comedy. Media around gay men in particular seem to be weirdly cut off from the full scope of life.
And to go back to an earlier argument, this doesn't seem to be as big of a problem when it comes to serial productions. Uncoupled revolves around the love life of a white gay man, but it doesn't feel limited by the contrivances of the rom com, and it also features side characters who are living very different kinds of lifestyles. And then there's Pose, which just blasts away every single one of those complaints; It doesn't bother with comedy at all and it features a cast of colored people who are the activist heroes while the white people who are having gay sex are either not out of the closet or live in fear of coming out.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that Brokeback Mountain was over 15 years ago. And while I don't expect there to be some new "challenger to the throne", why do we not have more queer stories that aren't afraid to stray off the beaten path?
I joked with my friends recently that Everything Everywhere All at Once ruined other movies for me, except it wasn't actually that much of a joke. The movie was such a high point that all other...
I joked with my friends recently that Everything Everywhere All at Once ruined other movies for me, except it wasn't actually that much of a joke. The movie was such a high point that all other films I've watched have paled since (it was your enthusiastic endorsement that got me to watch it in the first place, by the way -- thanks for that!).
And I think you're spot on about gay movies being heavily romance-focused. There's a sort of triumvirate of trauma, sex, and romance, and any given queer film will very likely lean heavily on at least two, if not all three.
There's of course, nothing wrong with that individually, and it can be done well, but when it makes up the majority of the landscape, our horizons tend to look a little featureless.
Eichner is more polarizing than well-loved. His style of comedy can be off-putting to a lot of people. And while movies have taken a back seat to TV in terms of being discussed in the broader...
Eichner is more polarizing than well-loved. His style of comedy can be off-putting to a lot of people.
And while movies have taken a back seat to TV in terms of being discussed in the broader monoculture, Netflix is still spending a lot of money for movies (at least they used to before they hit financial woes). Including the 200 million budgeted film Red Notice and the star studded much discussed Don’t Look Up both of which came out last year. Other movies that perhaps weren’t big hits with audience last year but were successes in the awards circuit include Tick Tick Boom, The Lost Daughter, and The Power of the Dog.
And this year they came out with another 200 million dollar budget action film called The Gray Man. They spent over 20 million dollars acquiring Alejandro G. Iñaritu’s Bardo, and are coming out with a Knives Out sequel of which they bought the rights for for a whopping 450 million dollars. And that’s not even counting the countless of low-budget cannon-fodder that Netflix produces/acquires every year.
Putting aside the meta for a second, this is it for me. I haven't heard of this movie outside of this website. Did homophobia limit its reach? Maybe, but it hasn't made much of an impression on...
Not one of my queer friends has even mentioned Bros in our conversations. Were it not for the online blowback, I wouldn't even know this movie exists. This move has no real-world footprint for me.
Putting aside the meta for a second, this is it for me. I haven't heard of this movie outside of this website. Did homophobia limit its reach? Maybe, but it hasn't made much of an impression on The Gays either. Outside of my family, I almost exclusively spend my time with queer people (though admittedly, not mainly cis gay men) and no one has even made me aware of this movie's existence. Clearly there's some problem there other than it not appealing to straight people.
I really do think that this marketing campaign should have done a better job to communicate to the queer community what this movie was and its respect for them. There wasn’t a marketing model for a film of this scale that is a comedy — not a drama, not something serious, not something about gay trauma — going out on this scale to 3,000 theaters. They didn’t know how to do a marketing plan for that. They didn’t know how to communicate it. We shouldn’t be surprised that it messed up.
A lot of people say, “Well, what about Brokeback Mountain?” Or, “What about The Birdcage?” “What about Call Me by Your Name?” The thing is, for so many of those films, they involve straight actors playing gay, had straight writers, straight directors. Most of those things were released in a very limited fashion. Also, one of the things that this movie’s marketing did really poorly was constantly remind everyone that it was important and historic, and that was silly and ridiculous. This is a fun, funny movie, and it really should have been for other people to note if it is historic or not. What we have now is a situation where the only thing that feels historic is our failure.
I pitched ideas for posters that were not used. I pitched ideas for taglines that were not used. I was very vocal about what I thought they needed to be doing for community outreach. Nick and Billy and the producer Josh Church and Judd were very receptive. My ideas weren’t used. I don’t know where that happens, but the people I dealt with were excited about having people who think about the queer community thinking about how to communicate this one to people. I was fighting really hard to get a dance remix of the song from the end of the movie out before the movie came out, so that we would be in clubs and bars, so that the queer community would understand that this was our movie, and they were part of it. I don’t entirely understand the way that giant corporations make decisions. I’m sure that they thought they were making the best choices to get this film to the most people.
Drives me nuts when studios do this. Marvel's doing it with the second Black Panther movie and honestly it feels exploitative of Chadwick (and the audience to a lesser extent). That kind of thing...
Also, one of the things that this movie’s marketing did really poorly was constantly remind everyone that it was important and historic
Drives me nuts when studios do this. Marvel's doing it with the second Black Panther movie and honestly it feels exploitative of Chadwick (and the audience to a lesser extent). That kind of thing isn't for the filmmaker or studio to decide. Those accolades are given by the viewers. You can make the oscarbait of oscarbait, but if it doesn't resonate with viewers or break into the zeitgeist, it doesn't mean much. And that shit takes time. Maybe 'Bros' will be a classic once it makes its way to BluRay/Streaming. Countless movies didn't find their audiences until they left theaters. Or maybe it'll just be a flop, completely forgotten. A movie can't just say "I'm a great movie, love me!". Does not work that way.
American Beauty Basic Instinct (and its sequel) Secretary Eurotrip Last Tango in Paris Movie 43 Ghost And there are so many more over the many decades of movies. This is just off the top of my...
American Beauty
Basic Instinct (and its sequel)
Secretary
Eurotrip
Last Tango in Paris
Movie 43
Ghost
And there are so many more over the many decades of movies. This is just off the top of my mind.
Bros' poster is extremely tame by many romance and comedy movie standards. It's two fully clothed men standing apart with their hands on each other's butts. There's nothing sexual about it unless the suggestion that there is romantic affection is somehow sexual. I don't know how Bros' poster suggests graphically explicit sex through such tame imagery when two of the above (which are both famous movies) show couples naked and mid-coitus, and there are many other posters with a female character in a clearly sexual position.
Ghost is pretty much the closest since it's a straight romance. But otherwise, in terms of posters, Bros sits just fine alongside the rest of the rom-coms. There's nothing overtly sexual about...
Ghost is pretty much the closest since it's a straight romance. But otherwise, in terms of posters, Bros sits just fine alongside the rest of the rom-coms. There's nothing overtly sexual about Bros' poster, and I don't know how anyone could suggest it is just because it's showing tame affection. There's a ton of rom-com posters with the two straight stars holding or carrying each other, hands just inches away from touching a butt but they've made sure some female midriff is showing (like Just Married). Then there's Friends with Benefits that suggests full on penetration but that's not sexual because they're not touching each other? How about Just Go With it, where Adam Sandler and Jennifer Aniston are fist-bumping just under a woman's behind so it looks her butt are two wine glasses clinking?
PDA is pretty common on rom-com posters. How and why is Bros' crossing a line, specifically? Your description above had me picturing two men grabbing at each others junk or something in a very sexual way. Instead, it's a very tame poster with some casual PDA—so casual, I've seen it on primetime TV such as the Simpsons over a decade ago, when standards were more restrictive. Also: sports—the butt-grab is pretty normalized there.
What is it about rom-coms where such a benign act is suddenly interpreted to signal graphic sexual content when it's on the poster? What makes it such an exceptional genre that all other movie genres and their posters are suddenly not in consideration so Bros' must be considered in a vacuum? When did it become established that rom-com posters must be held to such puritanical standards independent of romance movies and comedies? Is audience perception of rom-com posters really so completely divorced from the perception of romance or comedy posters?
Frankly, I find the idea that Bros' poster suggests hypersexual content to be deeply problematic. Looking at that poster and across all movie posters, even the artificial limit of rom-coms only, I can't find a way to suggest that without employing a double standard. Unless there really is another poster that is more obviously sexual than the one I'm seeing on Wikipedia or IMDb.
I think you're entirely right. In my circle a lot of people have given up on comedies in general because so few of them are funny. You need great word-of-mouth from the few who see a comedy that...
I think you're entirely right.
In my circle a lot of people have given up on comedies in general because so few of them are funny.
You need great word-of-mouth from the few who see a comedy that turns out to be funny. That doesn't happen instantly after release.
I saw the trailer shortly before the movie came out, and I thought, "That could be fun." But even in the Before Times I saw VERY few movies in the theater, and I go even less often now. Most of...
I saw the trailer shortly before the movie came out, and I thought, "That could be fun."
But even in the Before Times I saw VERY few movies in the theater, and I go even less often now. Most of the time I wait until it's available online. It has to be special in some way to justify the theater, such as inherently visual or immersive, such as lots of special effects (Avatar, Star Wars) or a costume drama. Or it's a "girl's night out" excuse, such as seeing Mrs Harris Goes to Paris with my BFF.
I'm almost the target market for Bros.
And by that I mean that my most played song for the last couple of weeks has been MUNA's cover of Britney Spears' "Sometimes" which I saw in the film Fire Island, which I watched before I even knew Bros existed because, even though I don't watch a whole lot of movies these days, the ones I do tend to be gay-interest films.
The problem with The Discourse surrounding Bros and Eichner's viral tweets, as I see it, is that everything that I have seen about this film feels completely out of touch to me as your everyday, average gay guy.
Let's start off with the the box office take: $4.8 million on opening weekend.
Yes, I understand that by Hollywood standards that's a bomb. The movie had a $22 million budget and $30 million for marketing. This movie will not break even.
However, going on a rant that something ONLY made $5 MILLION dollars is so out of touch with the world right now -- where everything is increasingly expensive and seemingly nobody has enough money -- that it's almost insulting. I just put through a refund of the $6,000 I paid in student loans post-pandemic pause so that those can get forgiven, and that sudden $6,000 that I'm going to get is a HUGE sum of money to me.
Furthermore, even having access to the kind of resources that can afford to spend $22+30 million dollars on you is unignorably huge. I spent ~$100 of my own money for classroom supplies and got some grant money for a comparable amount. I am grateful for that grant money. If someone decided that I and my colleagues were worth spending millions on, my position would be one of gratitude and deliberate humility.
Furthermore, I'm not going to lose sleep when a movie doesn't make back its millions when teachers like me, nationwide, still have to buy their own school supplies. That smacks of injustice; a movie flopping does not.
This sentiment is, admittedly, completely out of touch with how the film industry works though. The film studio didn't spend all that money out of kindness or a principled thoughtfulness -- they spent it in an effort to make more. When we are getting chastized by people who spent $22+30 million dollars in an effort to get even more dollars, it feels ethically vacant -- morally hollow. The vibe I get is "we dumped a fat chunk of change into commodifying your identity and it failed to meet our expected returns". The "how dare THE STRAIGHTS" sense that followed from that feels like it's attempting to launder cold monetary greed through the warmth of the queer community, and I resent when the thing I love most about my community is leveraged in such a negative way.
To then pin the film's financial failure specifically on homophobia specifically is, again, completely out of touch. Making five million is what we're calling a failure these days, and being anti-gay is... choosing not to watch a romantic comedy? We have come so far as a society if that's the dominant way prejudice is manifesting itself, but I can go ahead and say that the homophobia I have faced and continue to face doesn't look like the indictments Bros Discourse is dishing out.
If homophobia did impact its returns, it's far more likely that it's because a lot of gay people who wanted to see the film didn't because they would have to do so publicly in their local community. I live in a place currently where I could walk into a showing of it without an ounce of discomfort, but if I traveled, right now, to where I grew up, I would not feel safe going to see that movie in theaters.
The long legacy of queer media that predates Bros owes a lot of its success, acclaim, and reach to being able to be enjoyed at home, privately and safely. Eichner turned up his nose at streaming, but part of the reason LGBT-content has been so successful in that domain is that queer people can consume it without outing themselves or putting themselves in harm's way.
And before streaming there was piracy. When Brokeback Mountain released there was absolutely no way that I was going to go see that in theaters where I lived, but I definitely downloaded it and watched it at the time. I was in college, sharing a dorm room with another guy. I had to wait until he went home for the weekend to watch it without fear of him finding out, but even then I was on edge, worried that he might suddenly come back at any moment, open the door, and walk in on my secret.
Who knows how he would have responded if he did, but it almost certainly wouldn't have been good. It possibly would have been violent. I say that because after I did come out publicly in that area I was subjected to threats of violence and a few very close calls.
That's the kind of homophobia I'm used to, and it has thankfully thawed to the point that Eichner can now look at straight people responding to Bros with indifference and use the exact same word to describe that phenomenon. It's simultaneously a comment on how far we've come as a society but also, I feel, a dilution of the term on Eichner's part.
The film's creators keep talking about its reviews, CinemaScore, and positive screenings, but they don't seem satisfied that they made what they believe to be a good movie. Isn't that something worth celebrating in its own right? Isn't that what makes the film, as a film, more noteworthy than its returns?
I'll side-step here for a moment to say that I think Eichner's tweets are possibly doing two things that mean we can't necessarily take them at face value. I mentioned in a shitty hot take a few days ago (that I have regretted posting ever since because I don't want to be someone on the internet who posts hot takes anymore) that I think Eichner was drumming up publicity for his film. At the time I posted it, I was picturing Eichner as being pressured by people who were wanting their millions back, so of course he was going to say whatever was going to get attention, get in news cycles, and keep people talking about Bros.
That's possibly the case, and it did get a lot of press, but in thinking about it, I've also come to realize that Eichner very well could be trying to play defense for queer actors and creators in Hollywood. A lot of people higher up than him are very likely unhappy about how the movie was received, and by publicly and vocally pinning the movie's failure on straight people, he might be attempting to inhibit studios' reluctance to pick up LGBT-forward projects in the future. I can get on board with that, because despite me disliking the current stance of "Bros deserved to be a financial hit", I definitely don't want that "failure" to negatively impact related queer content in the future. One of the ways homophobia might actually play out for this film is that it'll unfairly become the yardstick by which all other gay or queer projects are judged and it'll thus have a chilling effect on future LGBT content.
Regardless of Eichner's intentions, however, Bros still fails to capture the queer zeitgeist in the way that it thinks that it's doing -- another thing that casts it as out of touch.
One of the complaints about Queer as Folk when it aired was that it captured a very narrow slice of gay life -- primarily white, wealthy, attractive, city-dwelling, club-going gays -- and that was on the air in the late 90s and early 2000s -- two decades ago. We've been having the same debates and criticisms about our media ever since, with plenty of additional content in the same vein, which makes Bros feel a bit lazy rather than landmark. It's not an entirely fair complaint (no one gay title should have to represent the entire gay community, and being a white wealthy attractive city-dwelling club-going gay is a valid way to be), but also many of us are interested in exploring things other than that one archetype.
Furthermore, the warmth of the queer community is inclusivity, but the types of people depicted in Bros are often some of the people that most vocally violate those precepts. Hyper-fit masculine gay guys are often extremely exclusionary and judgmental. Just because gay people are a marginalized minority does not mean we can't further some of the same discriminations in our own community. Body shaming, toxic masculinity, and racism aren't just common in some gay circles -- they're almost givens. "No fats, femmes, or Asians" used to be something you'd commonly see on online dating profiles and hookup apps, which is something that manages to hit a veritable major chord of discrimination in six short words.
The film is seemingly aware of this -- Eichner's character can't believe that the beefy Luke Macfarlane's character is actually interested in him (despite Eichner being very fit himself). The main plot seems to hinge on the idea that Macfarlane isn't a judgmental asshole, which only works if his character exists among a cultural backdrop of people like him that are. Maybe the film actually does more with this besides what's shown in the trailer (despite all I've written on the movie, I've only seen the trailer, so a lot of what I'm saying in this entire post isn't fair in that regard), but on the surface, this looks like yet another gay film without anybody I can really identify with and with portraits of gay people that look like some of those people who have actually made gay life harder for people like me and people who are fat or femme or Asian, etc.
I know that comparing Bros to Fire Island is passe at this point, but the latter had a small touch that I liked. Bowen Yang's character, in most (maybe all?) of the movie, keeps his shirt on. It sounds like a minor thing, but in a movie that features gratutious shirtlessness about a gay community filled with gratuitous shirtlessness, it was nice to see a consistently clothed character. This particular styling choice is used to contrast Yang's character with Joel Kim Booster's character who is almost always topless and reinforce the two as friends but foils, but I liked it because I'm a gay guy who, well, keeps my shirt on.
I'm a Bowen, not a Joel.
Some of that's because of my own body issues; some of that is because I'm not a sculpted Adonis; and some of that is because some of those sculpted Adonises feel they have license to be complete assholes to people like me who've got bad skin, no visible muscles, and a paunch.
I can't fault Bros specifically for casting a very attractive lead for a role that's supposed to be unattractive (because that's how literally every rom-com out there works), but I can fault it for trying to position itself as a progressive bastion when it comes across as rather pedestrian. If I'm feeling, overall, THIS out-of-touch with the film as a gay guy, why would straight people go see it? What are my lesbian friends going to get from the film? What about my trans friends who probably aren't feeling the lighthearted side of being LGBT right now because they're in ongoing fights for their lives, rights, and dignity?
The producer in the article calls the film "fun", "funny", and "silly" -- and that's fine -- but many people -- straight and queer people alike -- aren't necessarily feeling fun, funny, or silly about things right now.
I'll probably watch Bros when it hits streaming, but I'm not going to indict anybody who doesn't see it -- whether on the big screen or their home ones. Also, I kind of hate that it has pulled focus in the way that it has, because I hate watching pile-ons and backlash in general, and it stings for me in particularly resonant way when the target is queer people, which is hypocritical because I'm literally contributing to that pile-on right now. Ultimately I think there are just so many better things we could be focusing on and putting our energies towards.
I called the movie out of touch in this post, but ultimately I think it's the response to the movie that has revealed a sort of separate out-of-touchness. The movie compelled me to write my first shitty hot take here in a while -- years, maybe? And that's not who I want to be. I joined Tildes to get away from stuff like that.
Furthermore, writing at the length I have about this kind of thing is... not normal or healthy or a good use of my time? I kind of hate the part of me that felt compelled to say something when I simply could have chosen not to.
I realize this is me sandbagging myself and every previous paragraph of this post, but ultimately I feel like the healthiest response to Bros is to see it if you're interested, don't see it if you don't want to, and talk about it as you would any other film.
That's it.
Not one of my queer friends has even mentioned Bros in our conversations. Were it not for the online blowback, I wouldn't even know this movie exists. This move has no real-world footprint for me.
The way that everything has spiraled out of control online is, I feel, just a distortion of the internet, and I need to work on not being part of that distortion.
I was actually doing pretty good with that here for a while, I thought, but this pushed its way through.
To be honest, I just kind of can't stand movies anymore. So much about them frustrates me, and the fact that so much of what gets reported about them is related to money is one of the primary reasons that set me off. There's this idea that you must see a movie on it's opening weekend or it's somehow wasted, and I honestly don't see any way that is a natural idea that people have - the only reason why anyone would benefit from that other than overhyped nerds who can't control themselves is that the studios and distributors take the majority of your ticket money in that period. Fuck that; I'm going to see the movie when it's convenient to me, and I'm not going to stick myself in a room full of annoying people who may or may not have COVID.
The other thing that bugs me about movies these days is the focus on super expensive movies with absurdly expensive marketing campaign to get people to see them. They're made for the lowest common denominator, and so often they over-explain some concept so much that I keep finding myself sitting there thinking "they think I'm an idiot, don't they?" They are basically live-action rollercoaster footage, except there are so many special effects that it makes you wonder why they even bother to use real actors anymore. And to make matters worse, the way special effects people are hired is so backwards that they can win major awards for their work and yet go bankrupt doing them. And this entire process means that the actual quality of the movie doesn't really matter; even if a movie is hated by audiences enough people will go to them that they make their money back.
I don't think that I'm the only one who is starting to feel really disenchanted by movies lately. It used to be that Netflix and other streaming services spent a lot of time and money making actual feature-length films, but now it's really rare for them to risk it because nobody seems interested in them anymore. There's a movie I saw recently called Lost Ollie I wanted to bring up to some people, but then I realized that they actually released it as a limited series instead.
I'm going to ignore most of the controvercy around Bros and how Eichner and the producers reacted to the lukewarm reception because I've smelled smelled the oncoming drama and thus have been specifically avoiding it. I will say that I think that they were way too optimistic to be able to draw that kind of crowd. Yes, I know Eichner is well loved even among straights, but I think it was naive to think that they could get enough straight audience to buy into watching a movie about the world as seen by gay men. That's as far as I'll go on that topic, though.
What I will say is that I think that movies featuring gay men have the tendency to be kind of ... simple? It's kind of hard to put these feelings into words. @kfwyre is right to bring up that a lot of queer media tends to focus on very specific groups of people, and while I'd agree that I'm tired of watching perfect white man problems, I don't think that's the only problem. It seems that movies that feature gay people tend to be kind of shoved into the genre of romantic comedy. Media around gay men in particular seem to be weirdly cut off from the full scope of life.
And to go back to an earlier argument, this doesn't seem to be as big of a problem when it comes to serial productions. Uncoupled revolves around the love life of a white gay man, but it doesn't feel limited by the contrivances of the rom com, and it also features side characters who are living very different kinds of lifestyles. And then there's Pose, which just blasts away every single one of those complaints; It doesn't bother with comedy at all and it features a cast of colored people who are the activist heroes while the white people who are having gay sex are either not out of the closet or live in fear of coming out.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that Brokeback Mountain was over 15 years ago. And while I don't expect there to be some new "challenger to the throne", why do we not have more queer stories that aren't afraid to stray off the beaten path?
I joked with my friends recently that Everything Everywhere All at Once ruined other movies for me, except it wasn't actually that much of a joke. The movie was such a high point that all other films I've watched have paled since (it was your enthusiastic endorsement that got me to watch it in the first place, by the way -- thanks for that!).
And I think you're spot on about gay movies being heavily romance-focused. There's a sort of triumvirate of trauma, sex, and romance, and any given queer film will very likely lean heavily on at least two, if not all three.
There's of course, nothing wrong with that individually, and it can be done well, but when it makes up the majority of the landscape, our horizons tend to look a little featureless.
Like you, I find myself wanting more.
Eichner is more polarizing than well-loved. His style of comedy can be off-putting to a lot of people.
And while movies have taken a back seat to TV in terms of being discussed in the broader monoculture, Netflix is still spending a lot of money for movies (at least they used to before they hit financial woes). Including the 200 million budgeted film Red Notice and the star studded much discussed Don’t Look Up both of which came out last year. Other movies that perhaps weren’t big hits with audience last year but were successes in the awards circuit include Tick Tick Boom, The Lost Daughter, and The Power of the Dog.
And this year they came out with another 200 million dollar budget action film called The Gray Man. They spent over 20 million dollars acquiring Alejandro G. Iñaritu’s Bardo, and are coming out with a Knives Out sequel of which they bought the rights for for a whopping 450 million dollars. And that’s not even counting the countless of low-budget cannon-fodder that Netflix produces/acquires every year.
Putting aside the meta for a second, this is it for me. I haven't heard of this movie outside of this website. Did homophobia limit its reach? Maybe, but it hasn't made much of an impression on The Gays either. Outside of my family, I almost exclusively spend my time with queer people (though admittedly, not mainly cis gay men) and no one has even made me aware of this movie's existence. Clearly there's some problem there other than it not appealing to straight people.
One of the producers of Bros (who is LGBTQ):
Drives me nuts when studios do this. Marvel's doing it with the second Black Panther movie and honestly it feels exploitative of Chadwick (and the audience to a lesser extent). That kind of thing isn't for the filmmaker or studio to decide. Those accolades are given by the viewers. You can make the oscarbait of oscarbait, but if it doesn't resonate with viewers or break into the zeitgeist, it doesn't mean much. And that shit takes time. Maybe 'Bros' will be a classic once it makes its way to BluRay/Streaming. Countless movies didn't find their audiences until they left theaters. Or maybe it'll just be a flop, completely forgotten. A movie can't just say "I'm a great movie, love me!". Does not work that way.
And there are so many more over the many decades of movies. This is just off the top of my mind.
Bros' poster is extremely tame by many romance and comedy movie standards. It's two fully clothed men standing apart with their hands on each other's butts. There's nothing sexual about it unless the suggestion that there is romantic affection is somehow sexual. I don't know how Bros' poster suggests graphically explicit sex through such tame imagery when two of the above (which are both famous movies) show couples naked and mid-coitus, and there are many other posters with a female character in a clearly sexual position.
Ghost is pretty much the closest since it's a straight romance. But otherwise, in terms of posters, Bros sits just fine alongside the rest of the rom-coms. There's nothing overtly sexual about Bros' poster, and I don't know how anyone could suggest it is just because it's showing tame affection. There's a ton of rom-com posters with the two straight stars holding or carrying each other, hands just inches away from touching a butt but they've made sure some female midriff is showing (like Just Married). Then there's Friends with Benefits that suggests full on penetration but that's not sexual because they're not touching each other? How about Just Go With it, where Adam Sandler and Jennifer Aniston are fist-bumping just under a woman's behind so it looks her butt are two wine glasses clinking?
PDA is pretty common on rom-com posters. How and why is Bros' crossing a line, specifically? Your description above had me picturing two men grabbing at each others junk or something in a very sexual way. Instead, it's a very tame poster with some casual PDA—so casual, I've seen it on primetime TV such as the Simpsons over a decade ago, when standards were more restrictive. Also: sports—the butt-grab is pretty normalized there.
What is it about rom-coms where such a benign act is suddenly interpreted to signal graphic sexual content when it's on the poster? What makes it such an exceptional genre that all other movie genres and their posters are suddenly not in consideration so Bros' must be considered in a vacuum? When did it become established that rom-com posters must be held to such puritanical standards independent of romance movies and comedies? Is audience perception of rom-com posters really so completely divorced from the perception of romance or comedy posters?
Frankly, I find the idea that Bros' poster suggests hypersexual content to be deeply problematic. Looking at that poster and across all movie posters, even the artificial limit of rom-coms only, I can't find a way to suggest that without employing a double standard. Unless there really is another poster that is more obviously sexual than the one I'm seeing on Wikipedia or IMDb.
Was there a glitch that rendered only the last paragraph of my last comment visible?
How good must this movie be for underperforming to become an issue? It's a comedy, it didn't do so well. Maybe it's not that funny.
I think you're entirely right.
In my circle a lot of people have given up on comedies in general because so few of them are funny.
You need great word-of-mouth from the few who see a comedy that turns out to be funny. That doesn't happen instantly after release.
Yeah... it is fairly
commonexpected for any movie to fail.Even movies that are very good, actually. It is a competitive market.
I saw the trailer shortly before the movie came out, and I thought, "That could be fun."
But even in the Before Times I saw VERY few movies in the theater, and I go even less often now. Most of the time I wait until it's available online. It has to be special in some way to justify the theater, such as inherently visual or immersive, such as lots of special effects (Avatar, Star Wars) or a costume drama. Or it's a "girl's night out" excuse, such as seeing Mrs Harris Goes to Paris with my BFF.