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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.
If at this point "studios don't care about making profit" is something that strikes you as ridiculous and conspiratorial, you're basically saying no amount of evidence will convince you. There is absolutely no way Hollywood looks the way it looks like right now, if their primary motivation is profit.
Their primary motivation is profit and status, and for the money people behind the scenes, it's profit. They care a lot less about culture war than you do.
Hollywood looks the way it does because Hollywood has always been full of both "creatives" and studio execs who are actually very bad at their jobs and make bombs regularly. (And, in fairness, sometimes they just genuinely mistime or miscalculate the appeal of a film.) It's a very Current Year thing for you to read every box office failure as an intentional devious scheme by the studios to set money on fire just because they hate you.
If you're going to say that there are (at least) two primary motivations, I don't think you should get to act like people claiming one of them has greater primacy than the other are being ridiculous.
I'd expect far more people figuratively flying out office windows, if that was the case.
I don't think I care about it enough to lose hundreds of millions of dollars over it, they do.
Is it ok if I just read the ones explicitly advertised as "this movie wasn't made for chuds like you!" as it? (Not sure if Joker 2 would qualify, since I checked out from Hollyeood a while ago).
I think money is the greater motivator, and when I say status, I mean the status that comes from producing a moneymaker and award winner. If you think the "status" they seek is the status of winning the approval of their woke friends who think it's great that they produced a massively expensive disaster just to raised a middle finger to their enemies, yes, I will act like the people claiming that are being ridiculous.
A lot of actors, directors, and producers have had their careers crippled with a massive failure. Comebacks happen, but so does being consigned to the wilderness of low budget direct-to-video releases.
Yes, but an actor or writer throwing a fit on Twitter over criticism and saying things like that is not the same as explicitly advertising a movie as "Not for you."
A lot of people point at things like Amandla Stenberg saying "White people crying was the goal." Obviously a bad look and a shitty thing to say, and Amandla Stenberg probably would be happy to burn millions of dollars of (someone else's) money to make white people cry. But she's just an actress whose career will probably last five minutes after Star Wars, and she was being snarky on the Daily Show. She is not a studio spokeswoman and I am very confident that the producers of The Acolyte did not have "Make white people cry (and lose money)" as their goal.
That's fine, it's dismissing other possibilities as ridiculous that I'm taking an issue with (also pretty sure it's in violation of a rule or two, but whatever).
As others pointed out, awards are handed out internally by the industry itself.
Cool, so tell me how would the world look different if you were wrong about this?
I'm saying we'd be seeing even more of that. We'd also be seeing very different types of it. For example it would take a lot more to fire someone like Gina Carano, and a lot less to fire someone like Kathleen Kennedy.
I don't think these sort of declarations tend to be made after the movie has bombed.
Based on what? Why do you get to be "very confident" on absolutely no evidence, while declaring anybody who disagrees with you is ridiculous?
If I were wrong about this, we'd see nothing but woke replacements and writers and directors being overt about their intentions, no retrenchments or cancellations by studios when a property fails to earn, and massively budgeted productions like "Captain America: Gay As You Want To Be." I am saying you are not wrong that wokeness is a pervasive influence in Hollywood; I am saying you are hyperbolic and irrational about the degree to which every single person top-down prioritizes petty vengeance against their ideological enemies over profits or even production quality. I suspect this is projection, because it's what a lot of the people being so shrill about this would do if they were in charge: fuck money, let's rub the hottest culture war we can in our enemies' faces. It's not a rational way to view the world, but it's emotionally satisfying.
When you get to the level of big Hollywood moneymaking, you care more about money than whether you pissed off some incels on Twitter.
They replaced Captain America with a black man. I don't think he's supposed to be gay, but surely it counts as a woke replacement.
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I'd say that if you think that "throwing all their money into a bonfire and basking at the flames as it all burns" is not only a reasonable standard, but apparently the bare minimum, for the claim "they are not primarily motivated by profit", I think you are the one being hyperbolic and irrational, which makes your claims of projection extra-ironic.
Is there any field where you hold yourself to this standard? To me it looks like the same type of argument as "trans women aren't winning at every competition, so it's not a problem they're competing with women" that Darwin used on you once.
This claim is trotted out regularly as if it's evidence in itself, but it has literally no backing.
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Awards are dolled out by movie creator's peers, there is no external oversight evaluating movies, and with Holywood is heavily skewed towards the left (so much so, that there are several movies decrying the Red Scare, but 0 about the Roosevelt (D)'s camps, despite the former affecting much less people much less severely), members of AMPAS will naturally identify with and understand leftist messaging.
You know, it is surprising that, say, Farewell to Manzanar doesn't have a movie adaptation. Are there really none? I certainly can't think of any.
There was a made-for-TV movie in 1976
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