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Spoilers for Joker: Folie à Deux (2024) ahead
Time for some low-stakes culture war. The sequel to Joaquin Phoenix's Joker movie is out. The first movie was essentially a remake of Scorsese's Taxi Driver with a little bit of supervillain flavour that resulted in a moral panic about how its empathetic portrayal of a mentally ill loner might spark an incel shooting. In the end, no shooting happened and the movie made bank.
The sequel now takes a different approach and turned out to be a musical featuring gay icon Lady Gaga. A bold choice that critics describe as
The Critical Drinker, a, uh, heterodox critic went a step further and had the following to say
Internet randos floated memes to the same effect. First, a plot summary:
And now for some red hot culture war schizophrenia:
And while I think the above conspiracy theory gets the motivations and machinations of the ominous they hilariously wrong, there is something to be said about a Zeitgeist that sees anything enjoyed by (white) men as something in dire need of female supervision.
A small kink in that explanation: The second movie was written and directed by the same people. So, what happened?
I can believe the writers thought the audience "didn't get the point" the first time and wanted to write a new movie with the "correct" message.
I think the more sinister conspiratorial nonsense - that the studios literally don't care about making a profit (!!) and deliberately did this as a "humiliation ritual" just to punish the audience, whom they hate - is ridiculous and a sign of how far down a rabbithole this sort of "THEY are out to get you" thinking can take you. Maybe there is a screenwriter somewhere chortling as xe/xir thinks "This will show those white incel losers!" but I am pretty sure there is no studio that will deliberately put out a money-loser because all the money-men are on board with a "punish incels" program.
Given the plot summary, anyone could have predicted it would be a box office failure. Why they went ahead with it anyway is anyone's guess, surely there was a variety of motivations, but repudiating/disavowing their unsought, deplorable fanbase was probably among them.
Actually, not only was the failure predictable from the plot, the plot was predictable from the existence of a sequel. Can you imagine a world where the lesson they took from Incel 1 was that there's an untapped audience of very online white male social rejects desperate to be shown in an, if not positive, at least "nuanced" light, and the sequel delivered even more on the power fantasy and/or sympathetic hearing aspects? Why does that sound so much less believable than their decision to have their core audience raped in
Minecrafteffigy?See, I know people say this all the time about movies that should have been obvious bombs in retrospect. And yet it has always happened, throughout the history of Hollywood. "How could anyone have thought this piece of crap wasn't going to bomb?"
People just overestimate how good studios are at predicting winners, and underestimate the egos of the people involved. Also, projects often sound very different on paper from the finished product, and the development process, especially nowadays, can radically transform a movie into something unlike what the money originally expected.
Does it really make sense to you that someone says "Yes, let's waste hundreds of millions of dollars just to say fuck you to incels"? And that everyone involved in writing that check nods their heads?
Individuals involved in the project, maybe. Though even there, I think that is pretty rare. Do you think Lady Gaga and Joaquin Phoenix knew as they were making this movie that it would bomb? Or knew as soon as they read the script? And they were okay with it? Actors will sometimes sign onto a crap project just to collect a paycheck, but usually they don't want to be associated with a bomb.
That's not how that pitch would have went. It would have been more like "Let's build on our prior success and open up this IP to an even broader audience. 2024 is not 2019, times have changed. We must cater to the tastes of modern consumers."
Sure, but that's a miscalculation and a bad bet, not a nefarious scheme to deliberately lose money just to piss off people you hate.
They never seem to make the mistake of over-appealing to young males and thereby losing lots of money. So its pretty deliberate.
What's the counterfactual here? Michael Bay still makes four-quadrant films. Top Gun: Maverick is a four-quadrant film. The original Star Wars trilogy were four-quadrant films. I can think of far fewer big films that tried to go hard on the two female quadrants (e.g. Twilight) than went hard on the two male ones, especially now that we're out of the romcom era. Joker is a two-quadrant film on the other axis because of its rating, not deliberate alienation of women, where it hit broadly the same 60-40 splits as the typical comic-book movie (e.g. Captain Marvel, Spider-man Homecoming).
The counterfactual is some org taking an IP like Barbie and basically cutting the ending. The movie Barbie is accidentally based. Ken learns about the patriarchy, brings it to Barbieland and creates a utopia where everyone is happy except the weird Barbie. This is then destroyed by the MC and her new friend by a contrivance, but if you just left it at that and added some American flags and explosions, you'd have the counter.
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Michael Bay kept trying, but it turns out that it's REALLY HARD to lose money that way. Burr Steers finally managed by adapting a Jane Austen parody, zombie horror flick "Pride + Prejudice + Zombies".
When I think of teenage boys, I certainly always think slipping in a Jane Austen reference will get their juices flowing.
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You combine two things "lose money just to piss off people you hate" but this is wrong. Their intent wasn't to lose money. Their intent was to piss of the deplorables. Logically, they should have known by now it'll lose them money, because it already happened many times, but that's me trying to model what they should be thinking and not actually their thinking. They might have thought it'll be ok or that the "modern audience" will finally show up with piles of cash, or that their marketing is all-powerful, or they just didn't care and lived in denial. The point is they didn't have to have explicit intent to lose the money in order for their actions to lead to that. You can call it "bad bet", sure, but I think it's clear their primary motivations can be found elsewhere.
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What do you call a person who continues to double down on bad bets?
You can argue that the people really in charge are primarily driven by profit. But then you need to explain why these same people are continuing to make the same money-losing mistake over and over and over and over.
Ya know, you're not wrong, but this is a thing that happens constantly, and it's not because of a dumb woke conspiracy to force humiliation rituals on us.
My comparison is the government: why do government officials and politicians make so many empirically bad decisions? Why do many of them seem to be very bad at their jobs? Most of them are not stupid, and at least some of them actually want to be successful in managing the government and the economy. You can say some of them really are ideologues and just want to hurt their enemies (probably more true in government than in Hollywood), but most don't actually set out to be villains or incompetent.
The simple answer is that there are no adults in charge, and most people are just... not good at what they do. Ego and ideology do get in the way, but I believe in both Hanlon's Razor and Clark's Law.
Principal-agent problem. It's not their money they're wasting and there are preciously little consequences for failing the public.
Their job is to get the job and keep the job. Sometimes that requires being good at their nominal duties. But especially in politics, that connection is often rather loose.
Sure, but in a non-dysfunctional ecosystem, that just means that these people will eventually be replaced by people who are. The question is: why is the entertainment ecosystem so dysfunctional?
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I absolutely think that. Because these people have been on a conveyer belt their entire lives where they have never organically encountered a normal person. They think isolated, downtrodden white males who feel like society has turned on them are a tiny minority. It's inconceivable to them that they represent enough of their audience to make or break a film. They thought they were picking on a tiny minority nobody cares about to the delight of all their neoliberal woke peers who are obviously the majority. Right? Right?!
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