Stonewall Bombs At The Box Office

After withering reviews and widespread criticism of the lead character, Stonewall bombed at the box office this weekend, earning a meager $871 per screen in a small opening at 129 theaters. The Los Angeles Times reports:

The low turnout for “Stonewall” does not come as a surprise to some. Backlash over the film, which dramatizes the 1969 gay-rights riots at the Stonewall Inn in New York, began when the trailer surfaced in August. Some complained that the film does not accurately portray the real heroes of history but rather paints a fictional, white male character — Danny Winters (played by Jeremy Irvine) — as the LGBT community’s hero. One commenter on the trailer wrote: “This ‘Danny’ is fictional. The first people to pick up a brick and riot were transwomen of colour and other queers of colour, not some small town corn fed white boy.” Fast forward a month and a half and the film’s Rotten Tomatoes score echoes the negative buzz. The drama has a 9% positive rating, with many critics lambasting its attempt to depict a pivotal moment in American history. Vanity Fair critic Richard Lawson called the film “terribly offensive, and offensively terrible.”

(Tipped by JMG reader TJ)