Box Office
Flop · 0.1xBudget$53.4M
Worldwide Gross$5.5M
Queer earns a 9/10 woke score by building its entire plot around explicit homosexual obsession and identity politics, turning a 1950s story into heavy-handed messaging that audiences largely rejected. Skip it if you want entertainment instead of lectures.
The film centers its entire premise and emotional arc on the obsessive homosexual relationship between William Lee (Daniel Craig), a dissolute American expat writer, and the younger Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey) in 1950s Mexico City, directly adapting Burroughs' semi-autobiographical novella of the same name.
Scenes of explicit homoerotic pursuit, drug-fueled intimacy, and longing drive the narrative without deviation into unrelated subplots. Screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes stated that releasing a movie called Queer set in the 1950s in 2024 makes it inherently political, while director Luca Guadagnino framed it around barriers to connection but immersed the story in Burroughs' queer language and imagery.
Casting features straight-identifying actors in lead gay roles with no source-material alterations for diversity, yet the focal point remains non-traditional sexual identity as the core conflict and appeal. Reception shows critical acclaim (77% on Rotten Tomatoes, National Board of Review recognition for Craig) alongside commercial failure ($7 million worldwide against a $50 million budget) and bans such as in Istanbul over provocative content, with audience division highlighting its unapologetic emphasis on queer desire over broader entertainment. This centrality of LGBTQ+ romance and identity exploration as the foundational driver elevates the progressive ideological embedding far beyond incidental representation.
We've run a full content analysis on Queer and scored it 9/10 on the woke scale. Read our detailed breakdown above to see exactly what we found.
Our analysis checks for themes like identity politics, race-swapping, gender ideology, environmental activism, anti-religious messaging, and other progressive agenda elements. The score breakdown above shows which specific categories were flagged and how heavily they factor into Queer's overall score.
Wokeometer focuses on ideological content rather than traditional ratings (violence, language, etc.). Queer is rated R. For a full picture, combine our woke analysis with the age ratingto decide if it's right for your family.
We evaluate media across multiple ideological categories on a 0–10 scale. Scores of 0–3 mean story-first, 4–6 have moderate elements, and 7–10 flag heavily agenda-driven content. Learn more about our methodology →
Methodology: Each score synthesizes audience discourse, critic and aggregator reception, and press coverage — weighed against the work itself, not any single source.
See how this title scores across all 5 woke subcategories with detailed explanations.
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