This is off topic but when Brigerton first came out I watched it on Netflix without any context or knowledge of the books. I just assumed that it was a kind of racial escapism - a world where it just never occured to anyone to be racist. I kind of liked that as a genre of fiction. Turns out there are in-universe explanations for why people aren’t racist (basically the king married a black women which made it okay). To me, that explanation (putting aside whether it makes sense) took away from it.
There’s no shortage of fiction trying to be gritty and real and such. For the little while that I didn’t know better it was interesting to view Bridgerton as a world where nobody thought to engage in racial discrimination in the first place .
Are rom-coms really a good test market? Seems like the target audience for those are pretty used to a formula, so trying to do something ‘different’ seems pretty risky for such a bland/specific title. You, Me and Tuscany seems like it’s a little on the unrelatable side even for a romance.
This looks like a Netflix-tier rom-com. The male lead is even famous for the Netflix show he starred in. Why do they think that people would pay $25+ to go see it in a theatre, when there are a plethora of alternatives they are already paying for? Not to mention that this one will hit streaming in a few weeks anyway.
Totally agree. I watch very few movies in theaters and even less romcoms, so I can’t say for sure how big the audience would be for this kind of thing, but I imagine this kind of framing is just them begging people who care about black creatives to see this movie. I’m not black, but it feels gross from the outside. It feels like they are weaponizing race here. I’m only tangentially familiar because of rainbow capitalism and that always felt hollow to me. Queer media worth engaging with never told me that queer creatives depended on me. The media spoke for itself. I don’t know how other communities feel about that kind of thing though. I will say I watched bridgerton and the actor is gorgeous, so that will probably draw the people that go for the attractive men. His performance in the show was a little camp, but I think it was meant to be somewhat. I’m interested in seeing what he brings to a movie.
