I've been going through the star/producer Billy Eichner's twitter. He recently got in hot water for saying the reason the movie failed is because of homophobia. This, of course, means his twitter replies/quote tweets etc. are filled with chuds saying shit like "Go Woke, Go Broke" among a whole host of outright homophobia (thereby proving Eichner's point).

The trailer he has pinned is not very appealing. But everything else suggests the movie is really incredible. It has an 89% critic and 91% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, a 77 on Metacritic (where the audience score is being review-bombed by chuds), and an A on CinemaScore. In addition, Vogue called it the Best Rom-com of the Year, Collider has it as one of the best in recent years and Rolling Stone has it on its list of Best Rom-Coms of the Century.

There are a bunch of other reviews too, all very positive, in The Atlantic, Out , and Entertainment Weekly and endorsements from people like Chris Evans, Edgar Wright, Mariah Carey, Jack Black, Seth Rogan, Conan O'Brien, Seth Meyers etc.

All in all, it seems like a very good movie in which Eichner and others have put in a ton of effort. The fear is that because of the failure at the Box Office, this will make the major studios even more hesitant to put forth such movies (that star LGBTQ people, BIPOC etc.) because all they care about is, of course, profit.

There's an excellent thread by fellow star and producer Guy Branum that talks about this, along with responding to the only semi-genuine left/liberal critique of the film:

In talking about how cruelly Billy Eichner, white, cis, rich... demanded the queer community support his movie, a thing that is rarely mentioned is the rest of the cast... Billy asked for his movie to not surround him with famous movie stars, but with out LGBTQ+ performers.

Because of discrimination, there aren't many LGBTQ+ actors with box office draw. In casting the romantic lead of the movie, he could have asked Chris Evans, but instead he went with a guy who came out in 2008 and got stuck making Hallmark movies for 20 years, Luke Macfarlane, and yes, Luke is white and masc and cis and hot, but... Billy knew he had to draw attention to make $, and Luke is a gifted actor who draws attention.

And for the rest of the cast, Billy and Nick worked so hard to find veterans like Guillermo Diaz, who works constantly, but rarely gets to play gay, or stage actors like Becca Blackwell, who don't get many movies because LA has no idea what to do with bearded nonbinary d*kes. He found Allison Reese who was just doing her Kamala impression online, and pulled her into the mix. He fell in love with Ts Madison through her vines and helped continue her burgeoning acting career.

Billy took a risk convincing the straight guys and corporations to cast queer people without extensive resumes or B.O. draw, like me, in this movie. So when you pat yourself on the back for resisting the tokenizing, condescending marketing for the film. Also acknowledge that Billy Eichner held the door open for a lot of other, diverse queer people, and this movie doing poorly at the box office limits the opportunities which will be in our future.

TLDR: Bros = Good. Hating Bros = Bad, Chud Behavior (even if you think you have a valid, left-liberal critique). Bros doing poorly = Bad news for all minorities in Hollywood.

  • CTHlurker [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    Interesting, because I keep getting bombarded with adds for that particular movie. Almost no other movie-trailers get to me, so maybe I'm tagged as someone who would enjoy a gay rom-com? Genuinely wondering why I kept getting adds for it, because it looked like every bad romcom that Ryan Reynolds was doing in the early 2000s/late 90s, and I had fuckall interest in seeing those movies.

    • Diogenes_Barrel [love/loves]
      ·
      2 years ago

      spent 30 million on extremely targeted ads ig,

      well did it work? did the individual bombarded by ads for a movie an algorithm decided you'd like go watch it?

      this might be a potent example of relying on modern algorithmic(automated) adverts resulting in disaster :brow: it'll be interesting if anyone takes a critical look into it tbh

      • CTHlurker [he/him]
        ·
        2 years ago

        I did not in fact go watch the movie that i was bombarded with ads for. It's sort of a point of pride to not watch these things if they try to compel me.

        • Diogenes_Barrel [love/loves]
          ·
          2 years ago

          same, ads def put me off of any product lol. the real story is that the people fingered by the algorithm as lgbt are too cool to see or acknowledge adverts :screm-cool:

          • CTHlurker [he/him]
            ·
            2 years ago

            Thtas the weirdest part. I'm a cisgendered straight man, who is married to a cisgendered straight woman, and have a todler. Like, I'm pretty damn sure that I'm not LGBT, and I'd like to know how I came to be marked as "possibly lgbt" in their algorithm, because that seems like a dangerous amount of power for them to have in their profiling toolkit.

    • keepcarrot [she/her]
      ·
      2 years ago

      I feel like you should pirate and watch it. See if the algorithm has you pegged.