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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.
Sometimes it seems pretty obvious from the outside that a given production is going to fail miserably: Borderlands, as another example. This conversation has me wondering if it always looks like a train wreck on the inside (reshoots, recutting, extra VFX) in ways that we just don't see as outsiders. Was the set of a great movie, say Jurassic Park, less chaotic in these ways than Waterworld? It's conceivably sampling bias to see the trainwrecks from the outside.
I recall hearing that the production of Aliens was a complete shitshow, with James Cameron allowing issues with his personal life to interfere with production in negative ways. Also, some of the best Mission Impossible films, including 4, 5, and 6, apparently had 3-page long scripts at beginning of filming, with just an overarching narrative and various ideas of scenes in Tom Cruise's head, requiring the scripts to be written the night before the actual filming of the individual scenes, along with a ton of work by the editors to actually piece together a coherent narrative (Chris McQuarrie, the current director of the movies, got that role in a large part due to being an uncredited script doctor for 4 who was apparently brought in to fix it up during shooting).
So certainly having the productions be trainwrecks from the inside doesn't guarantee that the film won't be one of the greatest films ever made, rather than a historical megaflop like Waterworld.
But I think with something like Borderlands or Joker 2 or any number of other recent flops like Madame Web, The Marvels, or on TV The Acolyte or Rings of Power is that the trainwrecks aren't on the production, but rather on the fundamental artwork that's being expressed, mainly the script and also perhaps the cast. E.g. for Borderlands, it should be obvious to any layman, and certainly to any studio exec, that it's not a winning move to cast 50+ year old dramatic actor Cate Blanchett as an action lead and famously short comedian Kevin Hart as a no-nonsense serious big tough-guy soldier in a movie based on a video game aimed at teenage boys and young men. Even if the production had gone completely smoothly, it was just fundamentally doomed from the start, unless they relied on some other gimmick, such as having outrageously good action scenes (this is sorta what the Mission Impossible films rely on, which has worked for films 4-6, but not so much for 7, IMHO). Likewise, any layman could've read the outline for the story of most of these films and immediately pointed out major problems that would lose the audience.
It seems to me that, to be blind to these glaring issues and obvious red flags - so blind that you're willing to place hundreds of millions of your company's dollars on a losing bet - requires a lot of motivated reasoning which results from elevating one's own ideological biases over one's love of profit.
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