Gay Rom-Coms Won in 2022, Even if They Didn’t Make Money

When I first saw the trailer for Billy Eichner’s unapologetically gay romantic comedy Bros, I was in a movie theater in rural Michigan. My partner and I were visiting my parents in a small town where every other yard has a “Trump” sign proudly on display, despite the fact that former president Donald Trump has been out of office for two years. When the Bros trailer came to an end—on a shot of Eichner passionately making out with a hunky dude in Central Park—an older white woman in the audience called out, her voice dripping with disdain, “No thank you!”
We laughed at the absurdity of this woman being offended by a rom-com from the Billy on the Street guy. Wow, people really are homophobic bigots in the Midwest! How quaint! How ridiculous! Thank God we lived in New York City, right? We made fun of that lady for the rest of the trip. I was often the one bringing her up, beating that dead horse of an inside joke into the ground. But I couldn’t stop thinking about her. Deep down, my feelings were hurt. I’m queer. I like seeing queer stories on screen. I know how hard it is for queer storytellers to convince the people with the money—like the major studio behind Bros, Universal—that audiences won’t react exactly how that woman reacted when confronted with our existence. But I’m optimistic. Because 2022 was a year of mainstream, gay romance movies, and that’s a good thing, whether or not those movies were financial hits.
In addition to Bros, 2022 saw the release of two other gay rom-coms from big studios:  Fire Island  (from Searchlight, a Disney subsidiary), and Spoiler Alert (from Focus Features, a Universal subsidiary). All three movies are more or less formulaic romances with heterosexual counterparts. Bros is a Judd Apatow production about a commitment-phobe who falls in love, similar to Apatow’s Trainwreck. Fire Island is an “enemies to lovers” modern-day retelling of Pride and Prejudice. And Spoiler Alert is a rom-com-turned-saccharine-cancer-drama, which could easily be the plot of a Nicolas Sparks novel. But all three movies also made the effort to add specificities to the queer experience, rather than simply tell a straight love story with two men in the lead roles.
Bros, in particular, made a point not to make the exact movie that Eichner’s character in Bros tells his podcast listeners he was asked to write: “rom-com about a gay couple—something a straight might even like and watch with his girlfriend!” Eichner’s response to that producer pitch: “Our friendships are different, our sex lives are different, our relationships are different.” Bros proves that thesis by steeping Eichner’s character, Bobby, in his identity as a gay man. His job is gay, his friends are gay, his hobbies are gay, and his sex life is very, explicitly gay. Bobby says he hates movies “where two guys are about to hook up, and all of a sudden the camera conveniently pulls away,” so Bros does the opposite with a wide, lingering shot of Bobby getting a blowjob from two other dudes.

Fire Island, while not quite as gleefully explicit as Bros, is also very much a movie made by queer people, for queer people. It centers on one very specific queer experience—a group of young, poor, gay men taking an annual trip to New York’s Fire Island—and was based on writer Joel Kim Booster’s own history of visiting the famous gay vacation beach spot with his co-star Bowen Yang. Spoiler Alert is a similarly specific queer story, given that it’s adapted from Michael Ausiello’s memoir, about the final year he spent with his spouse, Kit Cowan, after Cowan’s cancer diagnosis. It’s a tad more sanitized than the first two films, but it’s powerful to see Parsons—an actor beloved by middle America as the nerdy, nervous, and very much straight dude Sheldon on The Big Bang Theory—embrace his identity as a gay man on screen. (Parsons has been married to director Todd Spiewak since 2017.)
All three of the above movies were received warmly by critics, but that’s not really what Hollywood cares about. Hulu doesn’t release streaming data, but according to the streaming aggregator Reelgood, Fire Island was the sixth-most streamed movie on the week it was released, which isn’t bad. Spoiler Alert‘s promising limited-release numbers were followed by a disappointing wide expansion this past weekend, but it may see those numbers grow over the holiday season. But it was Bros, the most high-profile from the biggest studio, that became the face of the story for the audience’s appetite for gay romances. With a $4.8 million domestic opening weekend, Bros was declared a “bomb,” a “flop,” and all those other dreaded words Variety and Deadline put in headlines.
Eichner was quoted—and then criticized for—blaming “straight people” for the less-than-desirable turnout. Experts fired back, pointing out that the lack of star power, marketing, and overall appetite for romantic comedies was also likely a factor. But after years of being told he is too gay for mainstream audiences, you can understand why Eichner would feel that way. He said as much in an interview with CBS Sunday Morning, when he was asked why it took so long for one of the big five Hollywood studios to back a gay rom-com, saying, “The real answer to that is that the world, including Hollywood, has been very homophobic. In some ways, Hollywood has led the charge when it came to LGBTQ issues and representation. And yet, underneath it all, I think there was always a fear that the ‘mainstream audience’ wasn’t necessarily ready for this type of movie.”

Minority filmmakers are constantly being told by Hollywood that their stories are a “risk,” and that box office disappointments “prove” the risk wasn’t worth it. That’s the pressure Eichner was under. And had Bros existed in a vacuum this year, maybe its box office failure would be the nail in the coffin for major studio gay romances for the next five years. But alongside Fire Island and Spoiler Alert, Bros became part of a larger Hollywood trend toward gay romances. It’s a trend that’s set up to potentially continue in 2023, with a line-up of promising queer films at this year’s Sundance, ready for purchasing from studios looking for content. And the more gay romances Hollywood puts out, the more chance these studios give for one of these movies to hit big.

Maybe the producers that Eichner alludes to in his CBS interview are right. Maybe “mainstream” (read: straight, white, conservative) audiences in 2022 weren’t ready to see Eichner making out on a picnic blanket, or Joel Kim Booster sucking off a dude in the back room of the Blue Whale club, or Jim Parsons screaming that he needs a hospital bed for his husband. But there is always going to be a homophobic woman at the movie theater in rural Michigan. Perhaps if there were movies like Bros, Fire Island, and Spoiler Alert every year, she’ll learn how to keep her offensive comments to herself. It’s just up to Hollywood to keep the ball rolling.