Pay attention, Fact Fans!
The second-most commercially successful movie of 2016 that isn’t a sequel, remake, comic book adaptation or cartoon movie? It is Bad Moms (number one is Central Intelligence starring The Rock and Kevin Hart).
Bad Moms, the girl-power comedy in which Kristen Bell, Mila Kunis and Kathryn Hahn toss their kids to one side and get up to some raunchy antics, has grossed $86 million and is a triumph for fledging studio STX Entertainment.
This despite—or perhaps because—it has offended all ends of the social spectrum.
First it was fathers who objected to being depicted in the film as decidedly deadbeat:
Bad Moms is such a sexist movie. Paints dads as pandering, slobbering, uneducated, uncaring neanderthals. Absolutely disgusting.
— Dusty Khoshreza (@Khoshreza) July 30, 2016
#BadMoms is also super sexist. The film revolves around PTA meetings. Not one father attends any of them…
— filmbum (@filmbum) August 17, 2016
While there are some women who find the film hilarious, others think it’s condescending to the female cause—and that that’s because it was scripted by male duo Jon Lucas and Scott Moore, whose previous credits include The Hangover.
@BadMoms Horrible crass sexist piece of shit written by two dudes. Can #Hollywood do anything right???#badmomssucked
— Katie Lehr (@burkepeaches) August 3, 2016
“Bad Moms” is what happens when men attempt to make a feminist movie https://t.co/PHT77zmxNA pic.twitter.com/5vVjwPZ4Dq
— Broadly (@broadly) August 18, 2016
Jane Marie, reviewing Bad Moms for Jezebel, the fauxminist blog that just lost big bad brother Gawker, summed up the female backlash to the movie, writing: “Having seen the movie, I also know that the men who wrote it probably don’t like their wives very much…it is a confluence of upper middle class, white people problems. Dumber still is that it was written by two men (of course).”
Then others got offended about a joke that Kristen Bell’s character makes in the movie about murdered trans man Brandon Teena (the subject of the Oscar-winning 1999 film Boys Don’t Cry).
Hey @BadMoms , are you gonna cut the horribly offensive Brandon Teena joke out of your film? Especially in wake of the Orlando shooting?
— Heather Matarazzo (@HeatherMatarazz) June 17, 2016
@IMKristenBell apparently it’s funny to make a Brandon teena joke re:boys don’t cry. It’s incredibly offensive. He was brutally murdered.
— Charles (@Bombsaway00) June 17, 2016
Another bone of contention was the seemingly innocuous fact that in Bad Moms, Bell’s character Kiki and Kunis’s character Amy have tween kids in the movie and in real life the two actresses have toddlers.
In @BadMoms @IMKristenBell and Mila Kunis are moms of preteens but are actual moms of toddlers. Another example of Hollywood ageist sexism?
— Cassandra P (@CPrestonova) August 19, 2016
I’m not saying it doesn’t exist, it sure does. I just know we gave it a lot of thought and it doesn’t apply here. https://t.co/Xj9LL1Rtln
— Kristen Bell (@IMKristenBell) August 19, 2016
The exchange ended with the original tweeter subsequently complaining about getting trolled, and Kristen Bell telling her, “I’m very happy you asked about the age/sexism Cuz man it exists alot of places!”
The actress then asked her new friend’s permission to write about Twitter trolls, which she duly received. We’ll leave them to it.