People don't want to watch a gay romantic comedy because they don't want to watch...well, you know

Uncomfortable stuff nobody really wants to admit.

You may at some point have seen a trailer for the gay romantic comedy Bros which was released last week. You might have thought that you don’t really consume the type of media in which that sort of film would be advertised, but this movie has actually been subject to what mad-men call “saturation marketing,” wherein advertising for it has just been completely maxed out to the point that it’s everywhere. The reported advertising budget was a whopping $30 million, on top of a $22 million production budget. They pushed this movie hard and they have bet a lot on it. In my own relatively placid corner of the national theater market, for instance, Bros has dozens of showtimes spread across pretty much every theater in the area, every day. You don’t put a movie in that many slots, at that many theaters, unless you think it’s going to sell very well.

Well, it hasn’t. Relative to its budget, the hype it got, its wide release, and the sky-high 90%-positive reviews it’s getting online, it’s what the most learned and scholarly cinematic analysts like to call a “box office bomb:”

In grim but not surprising news, Universal’s Bros became the latest live-action theatrical comedy to play in primarily empty theaters. The Billy Eichner/Luke Macfarlane-starring romantic comedy earned just $4.8 million over the weekend. That includes $1.84 million on Friday, which includes $500,000 in Thursday previews. That’s a lower debut than Jo Koy’s Easter Sunday, which grossed $5.44 million in early August. The $22 million release, written by Eichner and Nicolas Stoller and directed by Stoller, is technically the first mainstream, wide theatrical release rom-com starring a same-sex couple.

I’ve never even heard of Easter Sunday, and yet it still handily trounced this movie at the box office. Yikes. What gives? Well, the film’s creator (Eichner himself) is blaming heterosexuals for not going to see it, claiming that “straight people, especially in certain parts of the country, just didn’t show up for Bros.” (He went on to beg “everyone who ISN’T a homophobic weirdo” to go see the movie. Just desperate stuff there.)

I do not disagree with this man. The movie is flopping because straight people don’t want to see it. Why don’t they want to see it? Here’s an uncomfortable but very bankable truth: It’s because straight people—even really liberal straight people who are advocates of LGBT stuff—don’t really want to watch a movie with a bunch of gay sex in it. They simply don’t. Even the most die-hard gay “allies” aren’t really into watching a movie like that.

And it’s worth emphasizing that there is indeed a bunch of “that” in this movie:

In Bros, Eichner plays unlucky in love podcast host/museum curator Bobbie Lieber, who falls in lust with strapping single guy Aaron (Luke Macfarlane). As the duo embark on a tentative romance, they also open up their sex lives to include hot and heavy threesomes (and foursomes) as well as casual Grindr hook-ups with other people. Capturing that aspect of contemporary LGBTQ life is something that was important for the film's out gay stars, and sets Bros apart from the typical Apatow/Stoller joint, where the central couple tends to be monogamous.

So this is a movie about a dude who falls “in lust” with another dude and they end up having a bunch of gay gangbangs and Grindr one-night stands? Wow, how is it even possible that this movie isn’t bringing audiences in by the truckload? It sounds like an absolutely perfect flick to go see with the ladies after a platter of chimichangas and a couple of margaritas.

Look, I’m not trying to be mean here. I genuinely don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings. But, I mean, well, look: If they released a rom-com about a straight man who was having a bunch of anal sex gangbangs with women, that would flop at the box office too. People are unsettled by odd sexuality and odd sex. Even after all this time and this many years of pretty radical post-sexual revolution politics, weird sexual behavior—gay or straight—is still unnerving for most people, and they’re not going to pay money at the box office to see it.

And yes, more to the point, I think for most people, gay sexuality is odd. It’s not even a question of morality or anything. The simple fact of the matter is, being compulsively attracted to members of the same sex doesn’t make a whole lot of sense from an evolutionary perspective, and a lot of people sort of instinctively recognize that and are unsettled by it, just like a lot of people are unsettled by dudes who are only attracted to, I dunno, foot stuff. You can deny that if you want, but you can’t deny a movie falling 40% short on its opening weekend and probably notching a 75% loss after it’s all over. That says something about audience attitudes.

The big problem, of course, is that it does sound like the filmmakers have accurately represented a large portion of “contemporary LGBTQ life,” or at least contemporary gay male life, which appears to be hugely dominated by this manic, reckless sexual behavior. That is the weird snag which gay activism has hit over the past few decades: The general effort has been to convince the broader public that gay sexuality is pretty much just like heterosexuality (aside from the obvious), but every so often the veneer slips and we all see otherwise.

Here, of course, the veneer has simply been ripped off. And moviegoers don’t appear to be into that. Movies are expensive these days; heck, the popcorn itself is usually like $14. People have to make pretty shrewd calculations about what kind of entertainment they’re going to spend their hourly wages on, and “hot and heavy gay sex foursomes” are apparently not at the top of the list, and can you blame them? Be honest.

Well, Bros is certainly still in theaters, so if you have any interest in seeing it for some reason, you still have ample opportunity to do so. I don’t think you’ll have much of a problem getting a seat at any time of day, though I wouldn’t be surprised if they start pulling the showtimes pretty rapidly over the next week. You can only lose so much money on a thing before the point you’re trying to prove gets lost in the red ink.