Quote:
Originally Posted by beachmouse
Lots of people are a sucker for a good and well-made ‘forbidden love’ story. This is getting bankrolled in part because of Brokeback Mountain cost $14 million to make and did close to $180 million in gate receipts.
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But Brokeback Mountain was an extremely bold movie to make, and a huge gamble as bold to release.
Not so now, when homosexuality isn't such a dangerous subject.
If the characters in Brokeback Mountain hadn't been two cowboys, the most hyper-masculine characters Hollywood ever produced, and hadn't been written by Larry McMurtry, who wrote Lonesome Dove, I doubt the movie would have ever gotten the green light.
One reason why it was made probably came from the success of earlier movies like La Cage Aux Folles. Movies audiences had already shown they were willing to spend money on a movie featuring gay characters for quite a while.
Every once in a while, Hollywood realizes there's a growing trend happening. If they seize the right moment and release a shockingly bold movie that has gone farther than any other in that trend, the flick can be a blockbuster if the story is good and well told. The actors have to be sympathetic and relatable, and the subject has to have had some ground plowed before to see if it will be accepted.
Jaws, Psycho, Who's Coming To Dinner?, and All Quiet On The Western Front are all examples of this.
Once the self-imposed limits are broken by these rare blockbusters, there's always a rush to imitate. But once a theme loses its controversy, the story has to have be better than its ancestors to become another blockbuster.
World War I is one of those subjects that's rising in popularity these days.
1917 was a big hit mostly because it was as high as Fast and Furious in it's endless action.
War Horse was a hit because people love good stories about horses.
The other movies with a WWI theme haven't done as well, but they all made money. I guess we will have to wait and see the movie before we will know if the gay theme is what drives it or whether war action will be the driver.
I suspect that if its a hit, it will be the action that does it. And I doubt any gay love sequences in it will be graphic.
Moviegoers aren't ready yet to go that far, and nowadays, few heterosexual love scenes are as graphic as they were in the past.
This is a desperate time for Hollywood. The studios have to deliver products that can fill theaters right now, so I'm sure the new movie won't be controversial.
But I think that a modern re-make of A Farewell To Arms, a conventional love story set in WWI, would be a much better bet of being a blockbuster.
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