Bros’ Colossal Failure Has Disney’s Strange World Creators Panicking

The market isn’t accepting films promoting some of the less traditional lifestyles in society. Ignoring ethics and politics, it has studios concerned financially.

If you read the forecast that audiences are projecting, maybe Disney’s best bet is to go straight to streaming? Whatever the reason, it seems viewers are less inclined to tune into material from a particular cultural bent.

Another day, another story about a Hollywood B-lister insulting audiences and society because they’re not interested in “the show”. Only this time, you have to say that Billy Eichner took a novel approach. Rather than telling people that they’re horrible if they don’t like his film, and rather than pretending its numbers aren’t as bad as they obviously are, Eichner decided to tell people that if they aren’t horrible reprobates they should see the movie. That’s a clever bit of reverse psychology but it’s going to take more than mind tricks to get people to see Bros.

https://www.twitter.com/billyeichner/status/1576686311829749761

The movie was projected at various points to perform much better than its paltry less-than-five-million debut. But instead of seeing any sort of financial reward, Bros is a film that will have made almost nothing at the box office and will be a near-total loss outside of other sources of revenue. It is a flop, even one on a budget. Models for predicting this sort of thing also failed the industry at large — even up until just before the weekend, reputable websites we regularly use for analytics were predicting it had a shot at ten million.

Romantic comedies tend to have high multipliers compared to their Thursday preview earnings, so a modest-looking $500,000 isn’t a death knell for this film, and the model still thinks it should hit $10 million. The fact that it’s an R-rated, LGBTQ+ romantic comedy complicates the prediction, since we’ve not seen anything exactly like it before. In general, novelty (whether it’s a new distributor, or a genre-bending plot, or anything else) tends to reduce box office earnings. But there are many instances where the reverse has been true. I think Bros may have a slightly lower than usual previews-to-weekend multiplier, since its core target audience may have gone to check it out last night. If that’s the case, it’ll come in with more like $8 million or $9 million. That’s hardly a disaster, but $10 million would be a great psychological barrier to cross.

— Brue Nash, The Numbers

That was not to be, however. Instead, the movie has had an embarrassing return. Though it will lazily be blamed on homophobia or some other means to criticize the entire population of earth, one needs only remember that Robin William’s Bird Cage debuted more than twenty years ago and quadrupled Bro’s intake. How is it that a comedy about queer material was able to do such a thing at a time when tickets were about half as expensive? In adjusted-for-inflation terms, Bird Cage nabbed eight times the audience and eight times the profit!

Either something has shifted in the culture or this was just a movie without any redeeming preview that made audiences believe it deserved their well-earned money.

https://www.twitter.com/arcadeyblog/status/1576806500424593408

But do you know who is feeling pretty darn nervous about the failure of Bros? It’s not someone you’d expect… unless you read the title of this article of course.

The Walt Disney Company already tried to introduce representation along sexual preference lines to a family animated adventure this year. That was Lightyear and it bombed harder than The Good Dinosaur. In other words, it was Disney’s most embarrassing box office flop since Treasure Island. Now, they’re going to attempt it again, although you’d never know it in the marketing. Strange World, the next Disney feature-length animated film, will debut this winter with a child character who allegedly is non-straight and has romantic manifestations on screen. But if you thought Disney was worried before, you’d better believe they need a truckload of antidepressants after seeing the reception of Bros.

Take out the politics for a moment and take out the ideology. Let’s just suspend all the moral and ethical implications, going immediately to objective financials. Whatever you may think about agendas or cultural movements, it needs to be noted that there has been a glut of major media efforts this year for 1) queer representation in film and streaming and 2) new wave feminist representation in film and streaming. Yet without fail those attempts have not succeeded financially. Perhaps it is the execution, perhaps it is a bigoted society or perhaps a cultural shift is occurring. Whatever you may conclude — and this article makes no attempt at answer it — there’s a risk involved for Disney with Strange World that is even greater than when the Reimagine Tomorrow videos first leaked.

And perhaps that is why Variety recently excluded Strange World from its list of major movies releasing this year. What that means, who knows? But Valliant Renegade caught the missing film in the Variety report and it has all of us wondering exactly what is going on behind the scenes.

Will Disney take Strange World out of the theatrical release window and go straight to streaming on Disney+? Would that be better than having a second animated film featuring queer representation fail at the box office? These are questions I pose to you open-ended. Maybe I’m completely wrong here on all counts, but I’m also not pushing any point of view. I’m just relaying a phenomenon occurring within the market we cover, whether it is right or wrong. Now Disney has to navigate what are certainly choppy waters and highly emotional seas.

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** This article was updated to resolve a typo. Thanks, TexasAndroid!