When Billy Eichner’s poorly marketed yet richly textured gay romcom Bros was released earlier this year, the critique from many queer viewers was that it wasn’t queer enough. The film, a big and glossy yet not unspecific studio movie produced by Judd Apatow, was a major step forward for the centering of LGBTQ+ stories but ended up as both box office disaster and intra-community whipping bro, unfairly expected to tick every box in every way.
The existence of Bros, like Love, Simon and Happiest Season before it, was important because of its bold mainstream positioning, an insistence that same-sex stories can and should be as expensively mounted and crowd-pleasing as straight ones. It’s not a dilution but a shift in perspective, not a reason for praise in itself but something to be viewed through a different, wider lens. This month, Spoiler Alert, another broadly accessible story about two men falling in love in New York City hits and in February, a gay couple lead M Night Shyamalan’s apocalyptic thriller Knock at the Cabin, both reassuring signs that the industry remains at least half-heartedly interested in allowing queer characters space in the multiplex.
