"'women's film' - Hollywood marketese for 'soap opera'" - and also as a purported cinematic milestone, the latter a tactic to draw "educated young adult males". Opening 12 February 1982, Making Love was originally hailed as a hit, earning an inaugural four-day box office tally of $3 million and swiftly expanding its theatre count from 300 venues to 700. However the strong opening of Making Love evidently exhausted any potential public interest in the film which would soon prove a costly flop: with a total cost between $13–14 million - including distribution costs and the $5 million advertising campaigns - Making Love'''s total domestic box office tally would be reported as $6.1 million. Reports of Sherry Lansing's 20 December 1982 resigning as 20th Century-Fox president noted: "The company has produced bomb after bomb under Lansing, including Author! Author!, Monsignor and Making Love" and that 20th Century-Fox would end 1982 with a loss of $16.9 million. (Lansing would subsequently work as an independent producer for Paramount Pictures.) The studio wouldn't recoup their losses until the release of Return of The Jedi in the summer of 1983. Critical reaction Upon its release Making Love was typically dismissed by critics as a glossy soap opera which dodged its sensitive ostensibly core issue. Gay film historian Vito Russo wrote in The Celluloid Closet that straight critics found the film boring while gay critics, glad for any attention paid to the subject, praised it. Making Love opened strong at the box office its first week, but poor word of mouth led to a large drop-off in box office receipts the following week. The gay rights activist Dennis Altman argued in The Homosexualization of America (1982) that, of several films released in the United States in 1982 that dealt with homosexual themes, Making Love was the only one that "suggested a willingness to portray homosexual relations as equally valid as heterosexual ones" and that "the wariness with which the film was promoted suggests real change will be slow." Social critic Camille Paglia in 2006 cited Making Love, which she considers "intelligent", as her "favorite film to date about gay men." Rotten Tomatoes gives the film a rating of 45% from 20 reviews. Home mediaMaking Love was released by 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment on Region 1 DVD on February 7, 2006. Awards and nominations The film's theme song, "Making Love" performed by Roberta Flack, earned its