39
votes
‘Joker: Folie à Deux’ to lose $150 million to $200 million in theatrical run after bombing at box office
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- Authors
- Rebecca Rubin
- Published
- Oct 14 2024
- Word count
- 935 words
Personally, I loved it. But it's not a film for everyone. Here's an excerpt from the best review I've read of the film:
If that sounds intriguing to you and you go in with the right expectations, you should see the film. It's the best I've seen this year so far, or maybe in second place to The Substance.
https://theestablishingshot.org/2024/10/joker-folie-a-deux-isnt-about-batman-lore-its-about-psychosis/
Okay, you got me, but I really do hate musicals. Is it worth it anyway? Does it make sense to stream it and skip through the music scenes?
In my opinion, if you go into it expecting a musical, you'll be disappointed too. It's not a musical at all. But the movie does use music to explain mental illness and show a little of what's going on in Arthur's head.
I'm actually surprised at how many audience members and reviewers are critiquing the movie as if it's a musical. To me, that wasn't the point of the music at all.
The musical scenes aren't like those in a typical musical where they sing the plot, so yeah you could skip them.
Then what are they there for? Lady Gaga to show off?
What I got from it was that they represented the shared delusions (the folie à deux) between Arthur and Lee. They sort of had this "we are right and everyone else is wrong," shared-glance feel to them.
Remember in the first movie how Arthur had a small dance number in the bathroom after killing the finance bros?
Picture that but with lyrics.
From everything I've heard, it seems like it's going to be one of those misunderstood cult classics that will get its due in years to come. I should probably go and see it in a theater.
Wouldn’t have guessed that to be a flop.
I heard that people who loved the first movie hated the second because it “insults fans of the first movie”. I hated the first movie (mostly because of the psychopathic celebration of edgelord logic). May I actually like the second?
I'm not a fan of the entire genre, and so am perhaps not the best person to comment, but reading the Wikipedia summary of critical reviews, the suggestion seems to be that rather than making fans of the first movie feel insulted because it was written with a different audience in mind, the film feels written specifically to resonate with those fans by criticizing them and their perspectives (justifiably!) and making them uncomfortable. Thus, people who hated the first movie might be more likely to simply find the second movie uninteresting.
If the goal of the films was to do something like Lolita, presenting the perspective of a monster who is still clearly a monster, then I feel like the first film needed to do a better job making a character who wasn't just consistently off-putting to a wide audience, while also consistently having points where even specific narrower audiences would find the character horrible and be made uncomfortable by any sympathy they had. Doing the latter in a second film, years later, after that narrower audience celebrated the first, seems ineffective.
Or perhaps, with the way our connected society enables the formation of niche subcultural groups with closely shared and extreme views, such a work is now simply bound to find people who simply celebrate the monster, and then have them become ardent and vocal enough fans that they define the work's wider reception.
This isn't a problem unique to Joker. I do not believe that the first film even did a bad job of making it clear that he was the villain in that story. There are just always people with exceptionally poor media literacy who latch on to these characters without understanding what the author is actually saying about them.
You see it with lots of other properties. The Punisher, Starship Troopers, and even Joker's own inspiration, Taxi Driver.
There's that, but I also think that there are a lot of people who understand the creator's perspective on the character, but just don't care. They enjoy seeing Homelander in The Boys terrorize and kill people who get in his way, and ignore the fact that he is unambiguously the bad guy of the story. The events of the past few years have shown pretty clearly that a significant portion of the American public is made up of genuinely bad people who enjoy making others suffer.
I honestly no longer think it's possible to make a character like that without some small group of horrible guys deciding to idolize him. I think turning such characters into pathetic objects of mockery is honestly one of the few really effective ways to get under their skin.
I haven't seen either Joker film, though, so I can't speak to how effective they were at that here.
Huh, I didn't get a celebration of edgelord logic at all from the first movie. I think a lot of pre release anticipation was built up over that idea, with a lot of think pieces coming out criticizing the movie before it even came out along those lines, but the movie itself did not at all seem to portray the main character as any kind of hero, or even as an antihero.
From my reading, it was pretty much a retelling of taxi driver with a bit more blatant social and economic commentary, which isn't the worst thing in the world
Hmm, it’s been a while but I do remember a distinct “we live in a society” energy carrying the movie and, yes, mostly the online-hype around it. I definitely felt like the movie criticizes “the society” rather than the people acting like absolute assholes. I don’t quite buy the whole angle of, if I remember correctly, not getting health care leaving him no choice but become a mass murderer and half the city cheering him on in the streets. There’s plenty of aesthetically lit scenes of mayhem that seem clearly celebratory and I don’t really believe any claim that the movie tries to work on a meta level beyond that. If it does, it makes it way to easy to skip that layer and just fantasize being the cool anti-society clown, and at the very least, it was marketed for that.
If you are down for a tragic romance that's sorta a musical then yeah.
Only thing that worries me is the musical part.
I hated the first movie for exactly the same reason.
Joker:French Subtitle is my favorite movie of the year so far. I would even say it retroactively improves the first movie for me, since I know it's all a set up to the events of the sequel.
It's a musical. I suspect the Venn diagram of Joker fans and musical fans are two totally separate circles.
I personally have zero interest in paying current year ticket prices for a 2.5 hour music video.
I loved the first one and love (most) of the musicals I've seen...
Life circumstances rarely let me out of the house and when I've got even two hours free I'd rather be riding my bike or something. Why can't movies get back to 90 minutes?
I haven't watched either, but I think it's so interesting in this discussion how not only do people have different perspectives on if it's a musical, but on how if the big shortcoming was because of this perception as a musical.
I feel very neutral to musicals by the way. It won't ruin a movie if it turns out to be a musical, but "it's a musical" will never by itself improve my odds of seeing a movie.
Heavy Spoilers in the linked video... but
Pitch Meeting says it best:
Spoilers
https://youtu.be/6Ufar-niEtAI haven’t watched this, nor King of Comedy, but I’ve seen Joker and quite liked it. I’ve seen quite a few reviews on this, even the ones including spoilers.
My (not fully informed) take is that Phillips is a coward. If you want to critique antihero movies, worshipping fans, making heroes out of villains etc, create your own IP. He deserves the bad reviews because you cannot and should not piss on the floor when you’re invited to someone’s house as a guest.
If you wouldn’t be given such a budget without involvement with a big IP, well, good luck. There are many indie filmmakers, with their own great ideas, struggling with the same.
But what did the original Joker movie have to do with the actual DC character? Whether you liked the 2019 movie or not, it's kinda undeniable that it's a rehash of Taxi Driver and King of Comedy with one(?) Batman reference beyond the titular character.
It was fine but it wasn't a comic book movie if you don't take marketing/branding into account.