Joker Sequel a Catastrophic Bomb

And why does Hollywood insist on torturing its ticket buyers?

I haven’t seen Todd Phillips’ Joker: Folie a Deux. I can’t bring myself to go watch it. It looks like such a drag. It isn’t just the reviews and the audience reviews, which are bad enough:

It’s also the film's concept—a softening of a character or an apology for the complaints against the first Joker movie. It’s a musical. It’s about love, supposedly. It’s about how all we need is love and how we can’t get love, and that’s why we turn to violence. I might check it out once it drops on streaming, but life is short.

To quote Comicbookmovie.com:

The entirety of this sequel is clearly meant as a commentary on the fans who idolise Joker and who filmmaker Todd Phillips rallied against when the first movie was accused of being a rallying call for incels. The problem there, of course, is that the number of people who view Arthur as a "hero" is a tiny minority, and Joker: Folie à Deux's message rings hollow, as a result.

Joker Folie a Deux should have been a cakewalk for Todd Phillips if the bottom of Hollywood hadn’t dropped out. But alas, it has. To find yet more evidence of an empire in collapse, look no further than Joker Folie a Deux, a movie no one seems to have wanted to make, and now it’s a movie no one will want to see.

Phillips has foisted his apologia on his fans, it seems. Why? To punish them for loving the first film too much, and maybe because both Phillips and Joaquin Phoenix wanted to murder the entire idea of the movie, the character, and the film’s lasting legacy. If that was the goal, it appears they have succeeded.

Joker came out in 2019, which seems to have been the last great year for movies, before the Great Awokening and the collapse of Hollywood. Joker was funny and weird. It was dark and had a cynical message, where the Joker shoots Robert De Niro in the face after saying, “you get what you deserve.”

The media did what it always does. It took things way too seriously, and before long, the film was treated like a Donald Trump tweet. The world comes to a grinding halt so everyone can cluck their tongues at how “dangerous” this art might be.

And:

I remember 2019 when Phoenix felt demonized by the accusations coming out about the movie and how it inspires violence. I remember his attempt to do damage control when he won the Oscar and began talking about animal rights.

I remember how strange it was that tensions were already so high in February of 2020, just before COVID hit that Joaquin Phoenix was visibly nervous. The film, like the others it was nominated alongside Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, The Irishman, and 1917 were films that the old Hollywood would have made but films they wouldn’t dare make today.

Just after Phoenix won the Oscar in February of 2020, COVID hit, then the Great Awokening, then January 6th. We’d come out of it as a completely different country, and the film industry would never be the same. So how does one even make a Joker movie in today’s climate? By not making a Joker movie, I guess.

I can’t help but think the Trump factor is at play here, with Phillips and Phoenix wanting to not be like what they think Trump and MAGA are like. Maybe they saw it all as “toxic masculinity,” or maybe Hollywood will never know how to tell good stories ever again.

Between the first Joker and now, Joaquin Phoenix has married Rooney Mara and had two children with her. Maybe having kids changed how he saw the world, and maybe that’s why he felt the need to destroy the Joker in every way imaginable.

The movie will likely bomb and go down as one of the biggest disappointments in modern film history.

It cost $200 million.

Movies don’t have to be that good to make money now. They just have to meet the baseline of expectations, especially a comic book movie like Joker. But it was precisely those expectations that Phillips wanted to deny. But why? All that means is your movie bombs.

There is too much of a focus on status and self-image in Hollywood now. They’ve abandoned their audience across the board. They don’t care about the majority of Americans who used to love going to movies. This year has been one of the worst in all of the years I’ve been covering Hollywood, not just from a box office standpoint, but the movies themselves are bad.

The bombs this year so far have been:

Furiosa - cost: $168 million, box office $67 million
The Fall Guy - cost: $125 million, box office $92 million

Francis Ford Coppola spent over $100 million on Megalopolis, which hasn’t made a dime. Kevin Costner also self-financed the epic western, Horizon, which made just $29 million.

I’m not the target audience for Joker, but it is a bummer to see how fear of the mob, or fear of being judged by the “woke scolds,” has successfully intimidated nearly all of Hollywood to sell its audiences down the river in hopes of some absolution of their collective sins.

Now, only Ridley Scott’s Gladiator sequel can save Hollywood. Let’s hope that one is good. I’ll be seeing it on the 18th of October.