Film Bros / Cinebros

Submission 9,390

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About

Film Bro or Cinebro is a derogatory slang term for a man who prefers movies that are thought to be outside of the Western cultural mainstream, similar to a hipster but specifically about films. Typically, they are generalized as liking older movies, foreign films and the films of auteurs including Quentin Tarantino, Stanley Kubrick, Martin Scorsese, Paul Thomas Anderson and Christopher Nolan. After the derogatory idea of a "film bro" became popularized in TikTok parodies, it saw pushback from people who felt that the enjoyment of non-mainstream films shouldn't be stigmatized.

Origin

On December 13th, 2017, Vice^[1] published an article titled "How to Know If You're A Cinebro," which outlined some tenets of what constituted a "film bro," though the archetype had been understood as part of the hipster subculture prior to their article. Some qualifications Vice laid out included:

There are only four kinds of movies you’re not embarrassed to like, max:
- The Fuck Yeah! Mind-Fuck 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)

On April 6th, 2019, Urban Dictionary^[2] user slaatu posted a definition for "Filmbro" that defined the term as a man who believed their taste in movies was superior to others, even though the films were relatively mainstream (shown below).

Spread

Over the following years, the term evolved to essentially encapsulate men who tended to like films outside of the cultural mainstream, and it was particularly directed towards men who did not care for movies in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. This was fueled in part by a now-infamous op-ed penned by director Martin Scorsese in November 2019^[3] in which he argued that Marvel movies aren't "cinema," saying that the oversaturation of superhero movies quash bolder and more inventive movies from lesser-known filmmakers and studios.

It was further fueled by a meme that spread in January 2022 titled, "Film Bros When You Tell Them You Want to Watch a Marvel Movie." That month, a TikToker posted a derogatory post about cinephiles, inspiring recaption memes referencing various films by describing their plot details and characters.

Though the initial TikTok was mocked on Twitter, it evidently spawned several imitators. On June 27th, 2022, Twitter user @cleooffilm^[4] posted screenshots of several other TikToks that appeared to mock cinephiles, gaining over 350 retweets, 1,600 quote-tweets and 11,000 likes in two days (examples shown below).

The posts kickstarted discussions of Film Bros on Twitter over the following several days, with many seeming to argue that the stigmatization of certain films as "film bro" movies was unwarranted. On June 27th, Twitter user @bambipaesan^[6] tweeted, "Filmbro’s definition shifting from ‘guy who watches Pulp Fiction daily and won’t shut up about Tarantino’ to ‘guy who watches anything that isn’t a blockbuster’ is kinda crazy," gaining over 1,400 retweets and 18,000 likes in two days (shown below, left). That same day, user @eveharmswrites^[7] tweeted, "The insinuation that enjoying non-American films makes you a “film bro” is so depressing lol," gaining over 1,900 retweets and 31,000 likes in a similar timeframe (shown below, right).

In what was likely meant to be a troll post, Twitter user @paynushaver^[5] posted an Iceberg Tier meme on June 28th that placed very well-known directors including Scorsese and Kubrick as the "most obscure" tier of "Film Bro" levels, gaining over 1,700 retweets and 8,000 likes in one day (shown below).