Bros busts at the box office

Under normal circumstances it would be utterly bizarre to think of an R-rated sex comedy starring Billy Eichner, a largely unknown actor whose biggest credit was a basic cable game show, as being an important film. But Eichner is gay and as soon as his movie Bros was announced earlier this year, it was immediately celebrated as the film that would finally bring frank, if comedic, depictions of gay sex into the mainstream.

Well, spoiler alert: The film was released last week and it was a box office bomb. It made less than $5 million its opening weekend, despite a huge publicity campaign and being released on more than 3,000 screens.

If you needed further proof the film was a failure, clues can be found at Eichner’s Twitter account, which would charitably be described as abrasive. Eichner lamented that “straight people, especially in certain parts of the country, just didn’t show up for Bros” and encouraged everyone who’s not a “homophobic weirdo” to go see it. Evidently, gay people also didn’t rush to see the movie.

At the end of the day, gay males are a small minority of the population, and a film that mines humor out of normalizing gay sexual behavior that is repellant and irresponsible was obviously going to fail. And even though I have no plans to see the movie, I feel fairly confident my objection to the sex scenes can’t be reduced to homophobia. Or at least this is what Eichner’s co-star Luke McFarlane had to say about filming the movie’s sex scenes: “There was a moment when Billy was like should we spit on each other? And I was like, ‘Nope! Nope!’ So that was something that I decided not to do.”

Based on the trailers and reviews, they should have decided not to make the movie. It includes jokes about being gay men being in “throuples,” people making jokes about gay sex with their young children, and a scene where Eichner’s love interest (a character the audience is ostensibly supposed to see as sympathetic) is participating in an orgy. In addition to the questionable sexual content, Eichner’s character works at an LGBT+ museum where the employees are a Baskin Robbins of gender identities we’re supposed to accept as perfectly normal.

One reason why the flop of Bros is causing so much anguish among industry observers is that it illustrates how Hollywood execs are increasingly having to make a choice—they can produce politically correct trash that egotistically furthers a progressive agenda, or they can make money. Evidently, they can’t do both at the same time.

That’s why Hollywood, more often than not, has to smuggle its unpopular political and cultural messages into films and shows that were popular long before they were subverted by woke writers. In fact, the day after Eichner’s dismay about Bros’ fate, the trade publication Variety announced “Velma Is Officially a Lesbian in New ‘Scooby-Doo’ Film.”

Still, studios have at least been put on notice by the backlash Disney experienced after woke employees forced the company to take a losing stand on a politically popular law to stop teaching young kids in the state about gender identity. Audiences are also getting wise. Like Bros, critics rushed to praise Disney-owned Pixar for shoehorning a gay character into its animated film Lightyear. And like Bros, the film was a commercial disaster.

Bros embraced esoteric ideas about gender identity, and defined its characters through unsafe and undignified sexual behavior—behavior even many in the gay community would reject. It then tried to package and sell to a broad audience a mess that, at best, appeals to a gay subculture. To quote Barack Obama, “yes, we’ve got some gay friends in the red states,” but you’re not going to get straight people into the theater by telling them they’re homophobic if they don’t think an offensive sex comedy is an historic victory for “representation.”

Anyway, it’s safe to say that America’s tastemakers won’t draw any rational lessons from the failure of Bros, nor does it seem Hollywood is ready to produce more fare that appeals to middle America. Maybe the colossal success of the Top Gun sequel this year will prove to be an incentive to produce more films that aren’t contemptuous of middle American values. In the meantime, Disney has yet another major animated film slated for release this year with advertising about a gay character and, like millions of other increasingly appalled moviegoers, I can’t wait to not watch it.