Of course, this phenomenon isn’t limited to Hollywood grooming little kids. It’s been a trend in entertainment aimed at adults and teens for years now. Remember Brokeback Mountain? There are probably more that I also haven’t seen, but you can log in to Netflix or Hulu and you’ll probably find a whole special section on LGBT movies—though not the new Netflix series on Jeffrey Dahmer.
But the recently released Bros is a slightly different animal. It’s a rom-com movie featuring an entirely (or mostly) LGBT cast, with the main story being about a male couple. Though it presents itself as a mainstream rom-com, it is anything but. Despite all the publicity and the vast numbers of people anxiously waiting to fork over their money to virtue signal their wokeness, Bros earned a paltry $4.8 million on its opening weekend.
According to IMDB, the film’s budget was $22 million, and thus far has only earned just under $7.5 million worldwide. And then there’s the marketing budget, which is reportedly in the range of $30-$40 million. It’s officially a bomb. The film’s “star” and writer, Billy Eichner, naturally blamed homophobia for its failure. “Everyone who ISN’T a homophobic weirdo should go see BROS tonight! You will have a blast! And it is special and uniquely powerful to see this particular story on a big screen, esp for queer folks who don’t get this opportunity often. I love this movie so much. GO BROS!!!” Eichner tweeted.
But is that really why the movie failed? I mentioned Brokeback Mountain above. That movie had a $14 million budget and grossed over $178 million worldwide—a commercial success. And that was 18 years ago, long before the woke craze.
So, why did Bros fail? According to conservative film critic Christian Toto, it was the movie’s content. “Most rom-coms don’t deliver hardcore sex scenes, something Bros does repeatedly,” Toto notes. “The film’s subplots may also hurt repeat business. The film takes shots at Presidents Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump, and gives a brief shout out to progressive darling Stacey Abrams.”
And, of course, the trailer doesn’t do the film any favors:
Yeah, no thanks. I’ll pass. I have literally zero interest in seeing a gay rom-com (strike one), a movie featuring hardcore gay scenes (strike two), or a movie that intentionally insults my political views (strike three). Perhaps that’s why Toto suggests it’s possible that “audiences are wary of the culture wars and didn’t want their weekend escapism to remind them of our tribal times.”
While Hollywood will, no doubt, insist everyone else is to blame and instead start producing “non-binary” and “trans” rom-coms—which will similarly bomb at the box office and force us to be treated to lectures about how homophobic and transphobic we are—the reality is that not even the LGBT community is going to see Eichner’s flick. According to Gallup, 7.1% of Americans are LGBT in the United States, which has 331 million people. So, if you do the math, millions of LGBT Americans didn’t waste their time with this movie either.
So, this really isn’t about “homophobes,” is it? Perhaps it’s the movie itself. The trailer makes it very clear this movie is probably the gayest thing anything could hope to see in theatres, and there are plenty of people out there who will see it just to brag that they saw it. But there are far more people who saw the trailer and realized that they don’t need to go to a movie that is blatantly pandering to a woke audience.