Billy Eichner Blames Straight People For His Movie’s Failure
Billy Eichner took to Twitter to blame a low turnout of straight people for the underperformance of Bros.
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This year has seen a pushback when it comes to audiences taking in movies and television shows featuring queer characters sharing joy. From Lightyear to Stranger Things and even the Harry Styles led upcoming feature, My Policeman, homophobes have been popping out of the woodwork to share their (quite frankly) bad opinions. And now, via a tweet that you can see above, Billy Eichner is shooting back at the deflated opening weekend box office numbers of his new feature, Bros, and shaming straight people for not turning up to see his queer romcom.
In a long tweet that acts as a personal statement from Billy Eichner, the star of Bros speaks to his disappointment in the fact that, for the most part, heterosexual identifying people just didn’t come out for the film. He goes on to say that although the movie scored some incredibly positive reviews from outlets including Rotten Tomatoes, CinemaScore, and Rolling Stone–with the latter naming the film one of “the best comedies of the 21st century”–straight people still weren’t interested. In fact, the homophobia and hate were so rampant during the film’s distribution process that Eichner revealed that one unnamed theater chain “called Universal and said they were pulling the trailer because of gay content.”
As we trudge forward towards 2023, the news surrounding Billy Eichner’s Bros is a sad one considering the love story that it tells. In the queer community, folks are used to seeing sad stories play out in which one–or both–of the people at the center of the romance die at the end. There are stories like Philadelphia and Dallas Buyers Club that focus on the AIDS crisis and its decimation of the queer community, Boys Don’t Cry that told the real life story of Brandon Teena (Hilary Swank) a transman who was brutally murdered, and of course Brokeback Mountain that told the love story between two sheep hands in Wyoming who face brutal penalties when the community finds out they’re gay.
As far as the lightness of queer joy is concerned, the entertainment industry seems to be running dry. Sure, there have been some solid films over the years including Love, Simon, Moonlight, The Birdcage, and To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar, and even television series like Heartstopper and Chucky, but it seems like Hollywood would rather drown itself and audiences in the sadness of a gay drama that ends in death and dispair. And that’s why Billy Eichner is upset about Bros not receiving the opening weekend viewership that it deserved.
But it isn’t all bad news for the Luke Macfarlane, Billy Eichner, Brock Ciarelli, and Monica Raymund led, Nicholas Stoller directed feature. According to his Twitter post, Billy Eichner said that when he snuck into a Los Angeles theater to catch a screening of Bros, he viewed it with a packed house of fans cheering, laughing, and even crying as the story played out. He also wrote that not only was he incredibly proud of the story that he and co-writer Nicholas Stoller penned, but that he was thrilled to have had the opportunity to see this lesser shown side of the community make its way onto the big screen.
