Stonewall, director Roland Emmerich’s earnest and godawful attempt to portray the legendary 1969 Stonewall riots as less of a landmark event for LGBT rights spearheaded by trans women of color and more of a backdrop for the self-realization of an invented, white, male jock from Indiana premiered this weekend.
There is really nothing about this movie that is good, except for the caliber of vicious reviews of what has already been crowned Emmerich’s newest disaster movie that littered the internet last Friday. So it is with something resembling relief that we can share with you, via The Hollywood Reporter, the news that virtually no one saw Stonewall. It grossed $112,414 from 127 theaters. For everyone too lazy to bust out those iPhone calculators, that’s a location average of $871.
If Emmerich had, say, doubled-down on the maybe less-ready-for-prime-time elements of what actually happened and had failed to reach the masses, these numbers, while low, might be logical. But Emmerich made it quite clear that his goal was to make something that would connect with a wider audience. As he told Buzzfeed last week, in an interview he probably already regrets:
You have to understand one thing: I didn’t make this movie only for gay people, I made it also for straight people,” he said. “I kind of found out, in the testing process, that actually, for straight people, [Danny] is a very easy in. Danny’s very straight-acting. He gets mistreated because of that. [Straight audiences] can feel for him.
One can only hope that Hollywood executives will read into this failure that, one, people don’t like bad movies (we have covered this fascinating proclivity of the average movie-goer at ThinkProgress before) and, two, cisgender viewers don’t need “straight-acting” audience surrogates to hold their hand through Greenwich Village and that such aggressive, sloppily-done whitewashing will only turn people — gay and straight alike — away from your film.
It is totally possible that the (incorrect) takeaway will just be “movies about the LGBT community don’t make money,” but the phalanx of critically-beloved and widely-watched television shows and movies that feature gay and trans characters are ideally powerful enough to counter that narrative. Tom Hooper’s The Danish Girl, starring Eddie Redmayne as Lili Elbe, one of the first transgender women to successfully undergo sex-reassignment surgery is already garnering much-deserved Oscar buzz both for Redmayne and his co-star Alicia Vikander.