It hasn’t escaped your notice, Joker Folie à Deux is a sequel that gets a rough ride. Commercially already since the film is failing at the box office, but also artistically since many people did not adhere to the musical proposal, while others did not accept the deconstruction of the character. Arthur Fleck is not the Joker and that is something the public does not accept. Everyone is talking about a commercial flop, and even if the launch is disappointing, is it really the case? In France for example, after one week of release, the film has already recorded 602,000 admissions, that’s 1 million less than the first Joker for sure (which attracted 1.6 million people during its release week in 2019), but we are still far from the predicted flop. 602,000 admissions in France in one week, that even makes it the number 1 film in France. So of course, there is the novelty effect, the Joker effect, the curiosity effect and it will be interesting to see if the – catastrophic – word of mouth of the film will have a negative impact on admissions in the coming weeks. . I remind you that the first Joker ended its run with 5.61 million admissions in France. Of course, it will be complicated for Joker 2 to get that high, but it’s still worth watching.
THE MADNESS OF GREATNESS
In the United States, it’s more or less the same story, the film opened its first weekend to almost 40 million dollars, while forecasts were counting on 70 to 80 million. 40 million is not bad if you take the figure like that, especially when you remember that the budget for the first Joker was 55 million dollars. Except that for this sequel, Warner has lined up the printing press, since it is said that the film cost the tidy sum of 200 million dollars, the budget of a big blockbuster with tons of special effects to produce . Moreover, according to Variety, if we add promotion costs, we must add an additional 100 million dollars, which increases the budget to 300 million, it’s enormous. But we know, it was the artists who broke the bank, since Joaquin Phoenix took 20 million and Lady Gaga 12 million. I imagine that Todd Philipps also took a nice check, but the amount of his salary remains unknown. In any case, we are dealing with significant amounts and given the catastrophic start there is little chance that the film will cover its costs, especially since word of mouth is one of the worst in a while. In the United States, the film received a rating of D, making it the lowest rated comic book movie by spectators. It’s inferior to Madame Web, to the two Shazams (those horrors yes), less good than The Marvels or The Flash, I think we are in the midst of abuse and characterized bad faith. Because if Joker Folie à Deux is so ‘review-bombered’, it’s because of its musical comedy proposition, which isn’t really one anyway. Because once again, the subject is far from being uninteresting, quite the contrary.
NOLAN, THE BOSS
As for Christopher Nolan, the most popular filmmaker of the moment, the new Steven Spielberg for some, we learn that the latter had the last word on the making of the first Joker. In an article devoted to the consequences of the commercial failure of Joker Folie à deux, the Hollywood Reporter investigated on its own and was even able to interview quite a few people who worked on the film, people who wished to remain anonymous. And we learned in particular thanks to one of them that the ending of the first Joker was modified by Christopher Nolan, when he was still working for Warner Bros. and who still got along with them. According to the Hollywood Reporter, the first version of the script had envisaged Arthur Fleck slashing his face in front of the crowd who came to cheer him at the end of the film. But Nolan was against this idea from the start and requested that the ending be changed. For him, it’s not just his own Joker, played by Heath Ledger, who had the right to mutilate himself like this. It’s quite a curious decision because never in The Dark Knight do we see the Joker slashing his face. He bears the scars of this mutilation and, moreover, he plays with them since each time, he tells a different story, just to cover his tracks on his angelic smile. And so finally, somewhere, we have an answer to this big question from The Dark Knight. Heath Ledger’s Joker actually cut his own face…
ARTHUR IS NOT THE JOKER
Given that Christopher Nolan had a falling out with Warner and that he has now gone sailing with Universal (with whom he released Oppenheimer), Todd Phillips was able to return to the concept that he had initially imagined and it is in the Joker Folie à Deux as the scene finally takes place. I talked about it in the spoiler part of my review, at the end of the film, Arthur Fleck is killed by a fellow inmate of Arkham Asylum. A fellow inmate who had the right to a close-up halfway through the film and who was already suggesting that something was going to happen with him. This was not missed since we see him slash his face and mainly his mouth with the knife he used to kill Arthur Fleck. We see him at the edge of the frame, blurry as the camera moves closer to Arthur’s corpse. Todd Phillips also explained this ending, that the true birth of the Joker is inspired by the actions of Arthur Fleck.
According to Todd Phillips, “Arthur Fleck has accepted the fact that he has always been Arthur Fleck. He was never this thing, this idea that the people of Gotham stuck to him. Fleck is an icon in spite of himself. They put that on him. back, and he no longer wants to live with this false personality, he wants to be who he is.” Everyone doesn’t care about Arthur Fleck, people are only interested in the Joker, especially Lee, the character played by Lady Gaga. She never calls him Arthur in the film. The only time she does it is to dump him on the steps made famous by 2019’s Joker. It’s hard not to imagine what Joker 2 could have been if Christopher Nolan hadn’t vetoed this scarification. Would Todd Philipps embrace the idea that Arthur Fleck really is the Joker and not an idealized figure of social revolt? The question deserves to be asked.
Whatever happens, even if Todd Philipps had not imagined a sequel, we learn in The Hollywood Reporter’s investigation that if he had refused, he and Warner pundits Michael De Luca and Pamela Abdy would have become the laughing stock of Hollywood, especially after the billion generated at the box office. But things did not go as planned and the mistake of the directors of Warner and Todd Philipps was to have refused to do test screenings, under the pretext of avoiding spoilers. A decision that’s hard to believe, as the film doesn’t have a particularly spoiler-heavy plot, and even films like Avengers Engdame have had multiple test screenings. Afterwards, when you generate 1 billion dollars when your film costs 55 million, you immediately become someone who is completely trusted.
Who are then responsible for this commercial failure? For a well-known producer who preferred to remain anonymous, Joker 2 is “a collective failure, but it was the right decision to make this film”because Todd Phillips is a brilliant director who made Warner billions between the first Joker and the Hangover trilogy. And then no one would have refused to make a sequel to a film which was both a commercial and critical success, especially since at the time of the decision, the new bosses of Warner had to go back on track after that all of Warner’s programming moves to the HBO Max streaming service. What also emerged from this investigation is that neither Todd Phillips nor Joaquin Phoenix wanted to do a sequel and, for a time, even considered putting on a Broadway show instead, before finally committing in this sequel, to hire Lady Gaga. In fact, the idea for the sequel and this musical side came from Joaquin Phoenix who pitched the film after a dream he had. It’s reminiscent of James Cameron’s Terminator and Avatar, imagined after dreams, which has led some people in the industry to say that this sequel was made to please Joaquin Phoenix. In any case, this new failure of a DC film, even if we should not include it in the universe that James Gunn is preparing, puts additional pressure on James Gunn’s Superman. See you in July 2025 to find out if the public will be receptive…
