What Is A 'Film Bro?' The Slang Term Explained

Over the last five years, we've seen the term "film bro" undergo a rapid shift in definition. What was once a term for a guy who was enthusiastic to the point of annoying about movies has essentially become a catch-all for anyone who doesn't bow to the MCU gods, much to many movie lovers' chagrin.

How did we get here? That story involves a nuanced look at how movie discourse has shifted over the past few years, as more films have gotten swept under the "film bro" and "cinebro" umbrella while fans of cinema have pushed back.

Where Did "Film Bros" Come From?

If you like movies at all, chances are you've likely come across the "film bro" archetype at some point. In essence, the "film bro" is to movies what ""hipsters:/memes/hipsters" are (or were) to music: The "film bro" enjoyed left-of-center films, usually favoring the works of cinematic auteurs like Quentin Tarantino and Stanley Kubrick over blockbusters and family fare.

In 2017, Vice wrote a piece defining the "cinebro," imagining a man who liked certain, extremely masculine-focused movies and was pretty irritating about it. Vice joked the "cinebro" only liked movies that fit four categories:

- The F Yeah! Mind-F Movie (Inception, Oldboy, Mulholland Drive, Primer, Fight Club)

- The Yeah, It's Disturbingly Violent But We’ll Still Call It Art Movie (The Raid, I Saw the Devil, The Revenant, maybe A Serbian Film, any Quentin Tarantino film)

- The Extremely Average Guy Gets to Be With Extremely Beautiful Women Movie (Scott Pilgrim vs The World, 500 Days of Summer, and almost every Judd Apatow film)

- The Enough Display of Vulnerability, but Not Too Much Movie (Lost in Translation, Annie Hall, and Boyhood)

In 2019, an Urban Dictionary user outlined a definition for "film bro," highlighting how the "Film Bro" of yesteryear was a movie enthusiast who thought their tastes were superior despite being relatively common, like thinking the mega-hit Inception was an underrated, hidden gem.

The Scorsese Wars

Later in 2019, acclaimed director Martin Scorsese, an avid film lover and director of some of the most popular films of all time like Goodfellas, The Departed and Wolf of Wall Street, voiced umbrage with the increasing prevalence of franchise films like Marvel and Star Wars movies taking over movie theaters. In a now infamous op-ed, Scorsese deemed such films as "not 'Cinema,'" comparing their value as entertainment to that of a theme park ride.

He defended his statement in a New York Times op-ed pointing out that the intense focus by high-budget movie studios to churn out franchise films had a chain reaction throughout the movie industry, arguing their efforts quashed artists from making other kinds of films and made movie theaters more skittish to show films outside the mainstream.

Franchise film fans – Potterheads, Marvel fans, Star Wars fans, etc. – took extreme issue with Scorsese's take, as such fans have taken what some might call a stan-like approach to their favorite works, where criticism of the movies amounts to a tremendous offense.

This created a dynamic where Scorsese, who again has made some of the most popular films critically and commercially in the last 50 years of cinema, was deemed "out of touch" and a "Boomer" by champions of blockbuster franchise flicks.

This helped inform a perception that if you weren't a fan of mega-franchise films and preferred other kinds of movies, particularly those from non-English-speaking countries, you were siding with Scorsese and were cast as an enemy with the term "film bro."

The "Film Bro" In 2022

At the beginning of 2022, a series of TikToks grew notorious outside of the app. They featured Gen Z-ers mocking alleged "film bros" by making fun of the kinds of movies they like. These took the form of them making a shocked face while the caption read "Film Bros When You Tell Them You Want to Watch a Marvel Movie" instead of, say, "a 2 hour black and white movie about the Serbian government shown through the eyes of a pigeon."

This became a brief meme until the discourse surrounding "film bros" was revived later in the year when Twitter user @cleooffilm compiled screenshots from other TikToks in the same genre.

This was the tipping point for many that made the "film bro" discourse grow too far. Many found that it had become an overly aggressive slang term for people who liked movies of any kind that weren't blockbusters, and also noted there was a xenophobic air to the term, as people decrying "film bros" often made the insinuation they liked "uninteresting" films from foreign countries.

How To Use "Film Bro"

At the moment, be careful about who you're describing as a "film bro." While annoying movie hipsters who will rag on one's "basic" taste in movies certainly exist, the idea that liking things outside of Marvel and the like makes one a "film bro" is an extremely contentious and intellectually uncurious assertion.

For more information about "Film Bros," check out our entry on the term here.