Box Office: ‘Bros’ Flops With $4.8 Million Weekend

Universal's Bros became the latest comedy to play in mostly empty theaters. The romantic comedy earned just over five million dollars over the weekend. The Friday and Thursday previews have a combined amount of $500,000. Jo Koy's Easter Sunday made over 5 million dollars in early August. The rom-com starring a same-sex couple is the first mainstream wide theatrical release of its kind. The trailers and much of the media coverage made it clear that the film is important and important.

The film falls into the same trap when it is just a rom-com but stops dead in its tracks to celebrate its existence and hit every LGBTQIA discussion point. Every major celebrity profile emphasizes demographic triumph and aspirational empowerment, which is a common pet peeve. There is a variation of the righteously angry "Not Ready to Make Nice" in the headline. Stories about how every new young actor is the next great leading man/ woman on their way to conquering Hollywood may make the clients happy. It doesn't sell anything.

The film earned an A from Cinemascore and has a score of 9.1 out of 10 on the Tomatometer, so I am in the minority. I liked David O. Russell's Amsterdam so maybe I'm changing into a bitter contrarian. Bros was an original, R-rated, star-free romantic comedy released when Kevin Hart, Will Ferrell and Melissa McCarthy were still making movies. The only marketing hook for this movie was that it was the first mainstream LGBTQIA theatrical romantic comedy. Two decades too late is what it was.

The success of The Birdcage and In and Out should have led to the creation of Bros. Hollywood ignored its late-90s inclusive success stories and spent the 2000s and most of the 2010s chasing four-quadrant 'white guy discovers he's the special and saves the day while getting the girl' action fantasy' Bros or Love Simon are only some of the films we get. It is unacceptable that the Machines were supposed to be theatrical. The best scene of Bros is where the lead mourns his parents not living long enough to see him succeed.

It is an outrage in terms of the time lost, careers unfulfilled and social progress left undone, as well as the fact that Hollywood spent a decade chasing The Avenger as a skewed white men can save us from Al Quada. In the mid-2010s, Hollywood pulled its head out of its ass, only to crash into a new normal where studio programmers have less theatrical potential than they did before. Bros will probably end up with over $12 million domestic, hoping that they will get some help. It's dammit.

Ponniyin Selvan I opened in 510 theaters. The first film in a two-part adaptation of Kaiki Krishnamurthy's 1955 novel stars many people. The picture earned over $4 million in its opening weekend despite little media attention. That is an average of $8,059 per theater and a gross on par with Disney's Brahmastra Part One: Shiva. The per-theater average is a little larger than RRR. It is a solid debut for an under-the- radar Indian release.