Bros’ No-Shows - The American Spectator | USA News and Politics
Bros’ No-Shows
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What’s amusing about Bros — the new gay romantic comedy from the makers of blockbuster straight romantic comedies — is not that it bombed last opening weekend to become a historic disaster. It’s that the failure took Hollywoke and those who made the movie by surprise. The Universal picture ran on more than 3,000 screens and had voluminous free liberal advertisement but grossed under $5 million. Yet the producers actually thought they had a golden goose on their plate instead of a turkey. This is only the latest evidence of the clueless bubble in which they dwell, with zero understanding of the real world and its people.

Just ask co-writer and star Billy Eichner. According to Rolling Stone, “He wanted to make and star in a love story that aimed to be nothing less than the single most unabashed, honest, hilarious LGBTQ+ romantic comedy of all time.” He certainly made the single biggest flop of all time.

Witness the defiant movie poster meant to draw in the multitude. It displays the backsides of two men in T-shirts and blue jeans with each squeezing the other’s butt. You don’t want to see such a thing in an opposite-sex romcom even if one of the butts belonged to Scarlett Johansson.

But then you can’t judge a movie by its poster, so I thought maybe the trailer would offer better enticement. It opens with Eichner shooting a selfie video of himself while proclaiming, “Hey, guys, it’s Bobby Lieber coming to you from the future home of the LBGTQ+ museum.” Now there’s a dream absolutely nobody will appreciate. They couldn’t just tell the story of a gay professional in a normal field looking for love in all the wrong, and right, places. No, their protagonist had to be a fanatic, pushing his sexual orientation down everyone’s throat.

Following left-wing standard operating procedure, the creators of Bros are lashing out at the nonaudience for shunning their masterpiece.

The trailer next cuts to a table meeting of Eichner with five other activists, where an annoyed man vents: “This happens to be Bisexual Awareness Week, and no one has acknowledged it!… Lesbians get a month, and we get a week.” At which point Eichner drops his face onto the table — a cartoonish reaction that might have embarrassed Red Skelton. I’m pretty sure most gay people would avoid such a one-note meeting like the plague.

I gave the trailer one more chance to attract a nonfanatical viewership. It next depicts a restaurant dinner with Eichner and some male friends. “Didn’t you guys have an announcement?” Eichner asks them in a Screenwriting 101–level setup. “This is a little unexpected,” the obligatory Asian friend says gleefully. “We are in a throuple.” Cut to three of the men in bed. That was enough for me, and clearly for the vast majority of the people who stayed away in droves, a number that included many gay folks.

Doubtless, they’d prefer a cleverer, more subtle romance between two — not three or more — same-sex persons who don’t trumpet their sexual preference. For that matter, so might some straight women, the main audience for romantic comedies. But according to the genius auteur Eichner, anyone bothered by such displays has to be a homophobic deplorable. (READ MORE from Lou Aguilar: Blondes Have Less Fun: The Latest Tragedizing of Marilyn Monroe)

Consequently, this movie was supposed to put us in our place. Eichner said as much at the MTV Video Music Awards last August:

I need you all there on Sept. 30 because we need to show all the homophobes like [Supreme Court Justice] Clarence Thomas and all the homophobes on the Supreme Court that we want gay love stories…. And we support LGBTQ people, and we are not letting them drag us into the last century, because they are in the past and “Bros” is in the future.

It turned out to be a mighty bleak future for Eichner, Universal Studios, and Judd Apatow — the producer once known for crowd-pleasing heterosexual romcoms like Knocked Up (2007) and Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2008). Always a liberal, Apatow was another Hollywoke player broken by former President Donald Trump. Like most of his community, and every late-night comic host except ratings champion Greg Gutfeld, he has since forsaken half of his potential viewers. They of course have abandoned him, hence the abysmal performance of Bros.

A clever producer would be calling actress Katherine Heigl ASAP with an offer for a new boy-girl romcom, from one of the thousand scripts discarded for being too traditionally “heteronormative.” But that would mean succumbing to the Neanderthal mob who ignorantly still want a traditional love story. Apatow and his ilk would sooner make Bros 2 and virtue signal. Now, following left-wing standard operating procedure, they’re lashing out at the nonaudience for shunning their masterpiece. “Everyone who ISN’T a homophobic weirdo should go see BROS tonight!” Eichner tweeted.

The truth is that Hollywoke is dying — and will unfairly take the theater business down with it. Unlike the sanctimonious, highly paid industry players, theater owners are hardworking, bottom-line businesspeople who don’t give a rip that every actor in Bros is queer, whether playing a gay or straight person, as some kind of cosmic payback. They just want popular product that will fill their seats. But there’s not another Top Gun in the pipeline, just more unwatchable crap like Bros and the next Marvel movie.

I’ve been declaring for years that it’s up to conservative investors to take up the slack, to finance traditionalist film artists and pick up the free money on the table from the crowd of people eager to be entertained. Daily Wire Entertainment producer Dallas Sonnier can’t do it alone. He needs backup. With luck and common sense, help will be on the way.

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