Saturday, October 29, 2022

Opening night optimism for Bros, unfulfilled

I wanted to make sure I was in the opening night audience for Bros. It gave me the best chance of ensuring I'd have a review ready for Monday. Friday was already out since I had a delayed review for Barbarian going up from a pair of my other writers, and I don't post on ReelGood on weekends. 

Of course, the primary reason was that I wanted to support this movie. Desperately.

I didn't know, but likely assumed, that the movie has not done well in the U.S. Of course it hasn't. People are going out to the movies a lot less these days, and there's one particular sort of movie they consistently support in droves: a movie like Top Gun: Maverick. Bros does not stand much of a chance in this environment, even if it were a straight romantic comedy.

I suppose the thinking there might be more like "especially if it were a straight romantic comedy." Those have not been viable in years, and have basically been relegated to streaming. Being about two men, and all their super gay friends (really, this movie does not scrimp on the gay), might only help by at least giving it a novelty factor.

But then of course there is also the homophobia factor. And it's strong.

If my real-time googling of U.S. box office is actually yielding accurate results, the movies has made $11.6 million in the U.S. That's not terrible, probably, in this day and age, though at this time I am not going to compare it to all the other films that resemble it in some way that might bear itself out in the box office. But it's far less than the $22 million budget so I assume there is no way to view it as anything other than a flop. Which means a studio like Universal is far less likely to take a gamble on a project like this in the future.

Fortunately, I did not know all this when I walked into the Sun Theatre in Yarraville on Thursday night, Australian opening night, for the 9:20 showing. I went in on a cushion of optimism, buoyed by knowing that a friend of mine had liked it, though he had not yet gone into specifics. 

My optimism further increased when I saw that it had been put in the Grand, which, true to its name, is the largest of the screening rooms at the Sun. Given that no movie plays on more than one screen at the Sun, the fact that they had reserved their largest for the opening of the first gay romantic comedy from a major studio was a positive sign indeed.

And then I got into the actual theater.

I wasn't the only one there. No, there were about ten others, seated in groups of five around the back of the theater.

A theater which holds at least 150 people.

Is this just the era we live in? Is this homophobia? Is it just that opening night is not a real indicator of a movie's prospects, considering the people are more likely to go out on a Friday or Saturday night than a Thursday?

One thing I can tell you, though, is that my own personal optimism for the quality of the movie was fulfilled, and then some.

I've already written the review so I won't go into details here. If I remember I will link back to it once I post it on Monday. Or you can just go find the review itself, since it'll appear in my most recently reviewed movies on the right. Just know that I laughed a lot, and that I was impressed with Billy Eichner as a dramatic actor, in the relatively few scenes that required that of him. I already knew his talents as a comic, but this surprised me, as did his ability to sing. 

Also, it's super gay! I mean probably by some people's standards, they wouldn't think it was gay enough -- this is one of the film's thematic texts, what is gay enough and what is too gay. But for a mainstream movie, there were plenty of sex scenes, which were never graphic but certainly would have tested the limitations of what an audience weaned on heterosexual sex scenes thought they were ready for. And good on Universal for not telling them to keep things more chaste.

Really, though, I mean there were gay characters and trans characters and bi characters, and you didn't get the impression that any of them were tweaked in such a way as to fit better into the audience's perceived comfort zone. And by "the audience" I am of course talking about the straight audience, though it's difficult to tell how many of them actually came.

An $11.6 million box office could, in fact, be every single gay person near a major American city buying a ticket to Bros, with some of them seeing it twice. I hope at least a couple million of that can be attributed to straight ticket buyers.

It's probably not enough, though, which makes one wonder: How much longer will it be before a major Hollywood studio releases the second gay romantic comedy?

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