The Unfair Burden of ‘Bros’

Telling under-told stories is still an exhausting duty—and frustrating risk—in Hollywood.

‘Bros’ co-writer and star, Billy Eichner (Kevin Winter / Getty)

Last week, I was in Los Angeles and found myself with an unexpected chunk of time on my hands, so I decided to go to the movies. I went to see Don’t Worry Darling—not because of the gossip, or because of Harry Styles (as I told a friend, he could deliver my Grubhub and I wouldn’t recognize him), but because it (a) looked like it was beautiful enough to be meritorious of the big screen, and (b) I heard it had to do with incels, which I’m obsessed (freakishly fixated?) with. But, as the lights went down, a pang of guilt came over me because I remembered that I still had not yet gone to see The Woman King.

What did this matter, you might ask? Because, as challenging as it likely was for Olivia Wilde—a white female filmmaker—to get backing for her film, I know it was likely that much harder for Gina Prince-Bythewood, the Black woman director behind the Viola Davis historical-action vehicle. I also know that, in an industry reeling with uncertainty—and risk-averse to begin with—box-office performance is the No. 1 justification for (or rationale against) green-lighting future minority-led projects. I felt it was—is—my duty as a woman of color, and particularly as a woman-of-color creator, to use my dollars and time to support the work of another woman-of-color creator.

Supporting minority-led film projects like The Woman King doesn’t just affirm the need for more films like it. It lays the groundwork for future big-budget films centered on women and people of color. Against the intensely difficult backdrop of getting cultural output that’s focused on underrepresented groups to see the light of day is the shadow responsibility that weighs upon the underrepresented consumer: the need to support.

The pang of guilt hit me again yesterday morning when I saw a trade-publication email blast announcing that the Universal Studios rom-com Bros, which opened this past weekend, had been officially pronounced a “flop” after taking in only $4.8 million. Except this time, my sense of guilt wasn’t merely implied by my knowledge that I had not made time to see the Billy Eichner movie, but stated plainly by Billy Eichner himself on his Twitter feed. The film didn’t perform, he assessed, because “straight people didn’t show up for Bros.”

Admittedly, I had not heard of Bros until last week, during that same trip to Los Angeles, when I saw its eye-catching billboards all around town. Movie billboards in L.A. aren’t quite what billboards are in other towns. Instead, they are industry statement pieces: public pronouncements of what projects and programs studios and streamers are really banking on. Bros was promoted in marketing and media appearances as the first-ever gay rom-com from a major Hollywood studio, and, as Eichner noted in the same Twitter lament, it had received universally positive feedback after debuting at the Toronto International Film Festival and garnered a (rare) 91 percent “fresh” rating on Rotten Tomatoes. And still, the film was widely ignored outside of major metro areas like New York, L.A., and San Francisco.

Many people took umbrage online with Eichner’s finger-pointing, yet I could hardly blame him. Before the film even hit theaters, its performance was not set up to reflect his potential star power, the quality of the film, or even the appetite for theatrically released rom-coms. Instead, the question hovering over the film was, as The New Yorker plainly queried: “Will straight people go see Bros?”

Of course, there’s a simple commercial reason to ask that question. Any seemingly “niche” cultural project—be it a movie, a TV show, or an album—that achieves what is considered “mainstream” success can only do so by having “crossover appeal.” And, obviously, a film produced by a major studio—in this case, Universal—is banking on crossover appeal to hit its financial targets.

Yet there’s something fundamentally poisonous about framing the film’s performance relative to audiences’ willingness to come through. Doing so hangs the success or failure of a film not on a flailing entertainment industry or the appeal of sitting in a cinema in this given moment, but on the validity and viability of queer stories in the mainstream, period. Casting doubt on the project’s wide-scale appeal imposes a weight that frankly neither the creator nor the consumer should be forced to bear.

There are a lot of reasons Bros didn’t perform well; it being marketed as a queer film is just one of them. There was also the fact that a decently large swath of America was recovering from, or being inundated by, a major storm. Another likely factor is the anemic state of theatrical releases, regardless of genre. Moviegoing was already in decline before the pandemic, and, much like the current struggle to motivate workers back into the office, audiences haven’t been hustled back into theaters with any consistency. Finally, we are in a moment of steep inflation that’s affecting the value analysis of how people spend their money on entertainment.

Given all of the above, is romantic comedy the genre that best lends itself to a pricey night out on the town? Or, given the choice, would you save that money for a visual spectacle or collective night of fright seeing something like Smile—the horror flick that debuted this weekend at No. 1 in box-office sales—for instance? When you consider that most rom-coms coming out now—Father of the Bride and the delightfully queer Fire Island—have gone straight to streaming, the question becomes whether banking on a rom-com to score a theatrical hit was not the riskiest aspect of this bet. Especially one with, as I mentioned, no established movie stars. (By way of example, Marry Me—the rom-com vehicle starring two arguable members of the genre’s royalty, J. Lo and Owen Wilson—only grossed $7.9 million in its opening weekend earlier this year.)

And still, as I’ve been writing this, I’ve gotten trade-publication news alerts attributing Bros’ box-office failure to the film coming across as “too niche” (read: gay) in its marketing. The Wrap quotes an unidentified executive as saying: “By explicitly marketing Bros as the first-ever LGBTQ comedy, Universal ‘pigeonholed’ the movie among moviegoers, making audiences outside of its core demographic feel like it’s not a movie for them.” This is a familiar rationale, and one that the industry has used for years now to justify the status quo of white hetero storytelling taking precedence over anything else. But while dozens of films about straight white people flop every single year, it is only the projects by and about underrepresented groups that serve as referendums on the viability of future projects about underrepresented groups.

I remember nail-biting in anticipation of the box-office results for In The Heights, the 2021 film adaptation of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s pan-Latino paean to New York. When the numbers proved lackluster at best, the prevailing media and entertainment-industry takeaway was that “no one really cares about diversity.” (This was, by the way, exactly what Latino creators feared that people would conclude.) When the Steven Spielberg–helmed West Side Story debuted to weak box office as well, the presumption was seemingly affirmed. No one appeared to take into account that what was niche about these films wasn’t that they were Latino-led, but that they were musicals.

Reading Billy Eichner’s Twitter thread hurt my heart. Not just because I felt badly that my $16 wasn’t a part of that bottom line, but because I know his frustration lies in no small part in the understanding that while the film’s queerness likely isn’t the only reason it didn’t perform, it will be the reason that the next queer studio film is harder to get made.

Xochitl Gonzalez is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of its newsletter Brooklyn, Everywhere, about class, gentrification, and the American Dream. She is the author of the novel Olga Dies Dreaming and was a finalist for the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary.