Luke Macfarlane and Billy Eichner attend Universal Pictures’s Bros New York premiere at AMC Lincoln Square Theater. (Getty)
A group of pitiful homophobes have spent their free time review bombing Billy Eichner’s gay romantic-comedy Bros.
The film’s IMDb score plummeted to 5.5/10 on Friday (23 September) with 312 one-star reviews out of 678 despite the film not being out in public theatres until 30 September for US audiences and 28 October for the UK.
Since then, all reviews have been completely scrubbed from the movie’s page along with all professional reviews due to IMDb’s review system not separating critic and audience submissions.
But before they were removed, Out found that around 43 per cent of the remaining reviews gave the movie ten stars, while 78 per cent gave it at least seven stars.
Review bombing refers to the toxic practice of giving a piece of media a negative review en masse in order to deter potential viewers from consuming it.
It is usually done because of the bigoted views of the review bombers – with homophobia as the seemingly driving force behind this instance.
The shockingly low rating was especially surprising considering the consistently positive reviews coming from viewers at the Toronto International Film Festival, where Bros premiered on 9 September.
Additionally, the movie’s Rotten Tomatoes page – which does separate critic and audience reviews – saw an incredible 94% approval rating out of 36 professional reviews. Audience scores have been restricted until the film is released in theatres.
“Bros races along almost until the end when it embraces rom-com elements including a montage, that land as more clichéd than subversive,” BBC critic Caryn James said in her review. “But that doesn’t make the rest of this charming film any less entertaining and effective.”
Additionally, Nicolas Rapold of the Financial Times said that, despite the “recognisable contours of the romcom,” the film has a “rawness and a vulnerability here so foreign to recent entries in the genre” that it feels fresh.
Speaking to PinkNews and other LGBTQ+ outlets ahead of the film’s trailer release on 18 May, Billy Eichner said that it is “crucial” to prioritise the needs of queer people.
“From the very beginning of developing Bros, I let everyone know that, while I wanted to make a movie that was hilarious and relatable to everyone, first and foremost I wanted to make a movie that felt authentic to LGBTQ+ folks that the movie is about,” he said.
He then outlined how Bros in historical in several ways, being the first gay rom-com to be released by a major studio and Eichner himself becoming the first openly gay man to write and star in his own major studio release – a fact that he finds “bizarre and infuriating.”
“But aside from all the historic statistics attached to it, what I wanted most of all was to make an authentic, hilarious and heartfelt film about what it’s like to be a single adult gay man attempting a relationship in 2022.”