![]() ![]() No clear impediments to acknowledging his sexuality are made apparent as Simon narrates via voiceover the details of his teenage life. When framed further within the film’s first trailer, however, two things stand out regarding Simon’s closeted nature: the lack of obvious external factors that pressure him to keep his sexuality hidden and the intriguing acknowledgment of coming out as a process that encompasses both losses and gains. “He’s done keeping his story straight,” proclaims the poster’s tagline, which rests above a photo of Simon gazing serenely towards the viewer, a small smile on his face. The film’s initial poster puts the notion of coming out as a liberatory stand against self-deception front and center, albeit in winkingly coded terms. In doing so, it moves the film’s core appeal from the more amorphous questions of self-identity surrounding the coming-out process to the more immediately relatable issue of finding romance. While the first poster and trailer lean heavily on the vicissitudes and anxieties surrounding the closet in 2018, the second poster and trailer reframe Simon’s journey as one of self-acceptance as the path to the ultimate goal: young love. Examining these two marketing moments side-by-side, what’s most striking is a subtle shift in emphasis. Love, Simon has two of each-an initial poster and trailer released in the fall of 2017, and a revised poster and expanded trailer put out in January 2018. ![]() ![]() Which leads to the inevitable question: what, exactly, are they trying to sell? More specifically, what does it look like to frame a film about closeted youth and burgeoning LGBTQ identity both as a mass-market product and within a political climate far removed from the 1990s (i.e., the last time that major studios tried to sell LGBTQ images to the public)? The full intricacies of 21 st -century movie marketing-particularly the strategies behind digital publicity and outreach-remain beyond the scope of this post, but I do think it’s telling to consider the two more-traditional avenues through which studios frame their titles for the world: posters and trailers. ![]() Its planned release in 2,400 theaters further backs up the assumption that Love, Simon is a film aimed at the masses. Featuring such youth-courting cast members as Katherine Langford (of 13 Reasons Why (Neflix, 2017–present)) and made under the auspices of YA-driven production company Temple Hill Productions, Love, Simon has been positioned fairly unambiguously by distributor 20 th Century Fox as occupying the generic ground as such recent teen-centered hits as The Fault in Our Stars (Josh Boone, 2014). Briefly, the film follows Simon (Nick Robinson), a closeted high-schooler who begins to communicate online with a fellow closeted teenager who attends Simon’s school and goes by the pseudonym “Blue.” These e-mails are eventually discovered by another classmate, who threatens to out Simon to the school unless Simon assists his blackmailer in helping secure a date with one of Simon’s friends. Within this context, then, Love, Simon (Greg Berlanti, 2018) represents the first significant attempt by a major studio to widely distribute and market a film centering on LGBTQ characters and themes. Certainly, the aesthetic and/or ideological value of said titles are open to debate, but the sheer breadth of their reach gave them a visibility that many of the smaller, more targeted LGBTQ titles of recent years cannot compete with. One has to go back to the mid-to-late 1990s to find a sustained period in which such titles existed in Hollywood: To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar (Beebee Kidron, 1995), The Birdcage (Mike Nichols, 1996), In & Out (Frank Oz, 1997), The Object of My Affection (Nicholas Hytner, 1998). What we haven’t seen, in short, are wide-release, mainstream films centered around LGBTQ characters. Titles like Brokeback Mountain (Ang Lee, 2005), The Kids Are All Right (Lisa Cholodenko, 2010), and Moonlight (Barry Jenkins, 2016) eventually expanded to hundreds or thousands of theaters on the strength of Oscar buzz and strong reviews, but their initial placement within the cultural and economic market framed them as art-house or “indiewood” titles aimed at more “discerning” filmgoers. While there have been many films with LGBTQ characters/narratives/themes released to critical acclaim and relative box office success over the last couple of decades, almost all of them were distributed and marketed as essentially prestige pictures. ![]()
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