By Liv Barry
Lifestyle Editor
Billy Eichner’s new film “Bros” is the embodiment of a mid-life crisis.
Released in theaters on Sept. 30, the film is the first gay romantic comedy to receive a wide theatrical release by a major studio according to NBC.
Despite the weight on its shoulders to break the glass multiplex ceiling, the film severely underperformed during its first week. According to NPR, Universal Pictures expected the movie to gross $8 to $10 million upon opening, but “Bros” only garnered $4.8 million during its first weekend.
There are a number of reasons for its opening week flop. According to Deadline, Hurricane Ian shut down nearly 80 movie theaters in Florida, with closures in other affected states, including Georgia and the Carolinas, expected but not yet reported on.
Also, the film’s late Sept. release did not aid its box office earnings. The highest-performing Oct. releases are typically thrillers, with “Gravity,” “The Martian,” and “Joker” yielding the top domestic box office grosses for Oct. according to The Numbers.
While these variables factor into the film’s underperformance, the real issue with “Bros” lies in its genre; the studio comedy is dead, but Eichner does not seem to know this, or he wants to pretend as if it is not.
Long gone is the heyday of high-performing, studio-backed comedies like “Step Brothers” and “Bridesmaids.” According to Collider, these mid-budget comedies were outperformed by action-packed spectacles during the 2010s, leading to a sharp decline in their production.
Apparently, Eichner did not receive this memo. In an effort to replicate the golden age of studio comedies, Judd Apatow, producer of 2000s blockbusters like “Superbad” and “Anchorman,” was brought onto the project as a co-producer.
Reviving the studio comedy comes with a large asterisk, however. Can this genre be completely severed from the period-typical racism and homophobia embedded in the films of Apatow and his contemporaries?
There is no clear answer to this question. “Bros” struggles to make sense of it, resulting in a story that ultimately falls into the trappings of its straight predecessors.
For $10 a ticket, audiences watch Eichner condense his mid-life crisis into an hour and fifty-five minute run time. At 44, the comedian is just now hitting the mainstream and clearly wrestling with how to make his niche sense of humor appetizing for a wider audience.
On its surface, “Bros” is a great time. Packed with quick-witted jokes about everything from “Glee” to Deborah Messing, this film had me constantly laughing. Undoubtedly, once the film hits streaming services, its humor will help it find its intended audience that a wide release could not cultivate.
As a queer audience member, it is emotional to see such a gay rom-com receive a wide release, but I wonder why “Bros” had to adhere to the standards set by the heterosexual films that came before it.
In trying to make itself palatable for straight audiences, “Bros” fails to differentiate itself from other rom-coms while turning up its nose up at LGBTQ+ audience members that move through the world differently from Eichner.
Throughout the film, Bobby (Eichner) claims that he is smarter than the vapid gay men that his love interest, Aaron (Luke Macfarlane), surrounds himself with. The audience is given no reason to believe these men are vapid beside their sexual appetites and lack of encyclopedic pop culture knowledge, neither of which indicate an absence of intelligence.
At one point, Bobby even exclaims, “Gay men are so stupid,” after witnessing a feminine man voguing on the dancefloor — a barb that would feel at home in a homophobic studio comedy that Bobby so adamantly detests.
For all of his attempts to act as if he is above bigotry, the script falls into the same homophobic rhetoric that is spouted by conservatives. Bobby serves as an audience stand-in, as if to say, “Thank god I’m not like those other gay — flamboyant, joyous, unafraid — people.”
“Despite all of his protests to the contrary, [Bobby] is in fact hopelessly conventional, enamored by the standards of masculinity from which he feels himself set apart, a bro through and through,” Naveen Kumar said for them.
Not to mention, any character that is not white, masculine, and gay is pushed into the film’s margins. Bobby’s co-workers, who make up the remainder of the LGBTQ+ acronym, are used for cheap laughs at the expense of their identities.
According to the Los Angeles Times, contemporary LGBTQ+ cinema is built on the shoulders of indie films that were deemed too niche for major studios to fund. Instead of forcing itself to appeal to straight audiences, “Bros” could have followed the same path as “Fire Island” and “Happiest Season,” two successful, indie LGBTQ+ rom-coms released on streaming services.
While “Bros” defies the homophobia embedded in Hollywood, it begs the question of whether its wide release is historic, or simply assimilation.
Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
Photo caption: In the past five years, LGBTQ+ representation in media has grown exponentially. According to Nielsen ratings, more LGBTQ+ viewers tune in to television as representation increases.