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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.
The problem for your theory is that a lot of the creatives gain status by parroting or reproducing the tenets of their side of the culture war. Look at things like Amandla Stenberg's victimhood complex because she's -half - black, or how entire works like Eternals are marketed on "diversity", or the asinine changes made to Snow White because Peter Dinklage decided other dwarves getting jobs was problematic.
If you're a mediocre creative on a mediocre show that was hired because of inclusion standards to a work that far predates you and is frankly beyond your competence, what do you have to sell but The Message^(tm)? You have to dance with the one that brung ya.
Sure. The odd bit is that what's happening now is that Hollywood is incredibly IP-heavy compared to the past and even IPs with a track record are suddenly bombing despite us knowing they can appeal to their audience.
Nobody spends time on theories about why Sony comic book movies suck. They suck cause Sony sucks. Nobody wonders why Coppola took a huge shot and failed with Megalopolis. It happens.
It is worth wondering why successful franchises like MCU and Star Wars seem to be going against their audience desires (and outright being hostile to their fans) and suffering though.
I wouldn't say that they're burning money just to Subvert Expectations cause they hate people. In fact, it's probably because they've been successful with these franchises that they think they can experiment with drawing in new audiences without their contempt for the legacy fanbase costing them.
The theory is that they don't have to choose. They can serve their diversity goals (both in front of and behind the camera) while also making more money because there's an untapped market of female nerds who want to push the MCU as far as it's gone with the male cast.
It's a weird sort of incumbent's arrogance that they can have it all, made worse by their ideological commitments.
Actually, let me push back on that: the MCU was not destined to print money forever if only the writers could keep from going off the rails. Every trend, no matter how hot and moneymaking, fades eventually. There is a parallel in their source material: comics in the late 80s and 90s were extremely hot for a hot minute, and everyone was opening a comic book shop, every publisher was printing sixteen variant Collector's Item #1 covers of each new Spiderman/Superman/Spawn reboot, and Wolverine was guest-starring in cross-over stories in every damn title in the Marvel Universe.
That ended. It ended partly because of burnout, partly because of boring economic reasons, and partly because you just can't keep people excited about Wolverine forever.
Hollywood is of course a deeply and ironically uncreative industry (but then so are comic books, and book publishers, and gaming). When they see a cash cow, they will try to milk it until it's dead and they are trying to squeeze milk out of leather.
Your mention of Coppola actually speaks to my point: people think Joker 2 failed because it is an anti-profit go-woke-go-broke studio project to insult white men. If Megalopolis failed because Coppola is a megalomaniac who made a bad movie, presumably they don't think Coppola knew it was bad and didn't care, or never wanted to make money from it (though he probably would have been willing to make it anyway even if he knew it would lose money, because this was a passion project). But Coppola used his own money. I guess a very woke Coppola might have made a passion project to say fuck you to white men, but most people are not that crazy. I think it's much more likely the studios thought Joker 2 would be successful, and if it pissed off a few incels that would be an added bonus.
I think that there are different failure modes - conceptual and execution. To me it seems that Megalopolis fails as execution whereas Joker 2 was doomed as conception - if they instead have decided to just make it Natural Born Killers: the musical with Harley and the Joker amplifying each other's descent into madness it would have worked.
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