The blame game for Joker: Folie À Deux's failure has begun

Now that Joker: Folie À Deux is flopping hard—potentially historically hard—everyone wants to know: what went wrong? The first film received a mixed critical reception, but it made a ton of money and earned Joaquin Phoenix an Oscar for Best Actor. The sequel, which threw Lady Gaga into the mix, should have been a slam dunk. Instead, it was a super expensive critical and commercial failure, and Hollywood is ready to assign blame. 

Of course, it doesn’t take an expert to observe that a musical that’s ambivalent to being a musical and a superhero movie that’s actively hostile to being a superhero movie might not entirely land with audiences. But it sounds like Warner Bros. brass behind the scenes are exasperated that Joker 2 wasn’t more Joker-y. Director Todd Phillips “wanted nothing to do with DC” and reportedly didn’t even meet with DC Studios bosses James Gunn and Peter Safran, according to a new Variety report. (Joker is an “Elseworlds” tale that exists outside of Gunn’s DC canon.) “If the first movie was about some down-on-his-luck, mentally ill guy in a downtrodden city, it makes maybe $150 [million] worldwide. Not a billion,” an insider complained to the outlet. “People showed up because that guy was Joker.”

The Variety piece outlines all sorts of internal tensions between Phillips and the studio, with lots of statements from the studio denying the tensions. Phillips’ expensive decision to shoot in Los Angeles, his choice to premiere the movie at the Venice Film Festival, and his refusal to do any test screenings are all cited as sources of conflict, though WB claims to have been fully supportive of the director and his vision. Nevertheless, the tenor of this insider gossip indicates that the final cut of the film, which critics have described as a middle finger to the studio and the superhero genre, has scandalized the studio execs on top of costing them a lot of money. 

Ultimately, that sounds like WB’s own fault for giving the Hangover guy a blank check to do whatever he wanted with the character. Say what you will about Phillips and his vision, but he was always pretty upfront about the first one being an “anti-comic book movie,” so expecting something from him that aligned better with the brand would be foolish. He also expressed some exasperation that “the regimes changed so often” at Warners during the 2019 Hollywood Reporter directors roundtable: “You finally get everybody on board and all of a sudden they are gone and now you are starting over. And when you start over, sometimes people don’t like to inherit stuff from other people,” he quite rightly observed. No wonder he didn’t want to engage with Gunn and Safran—he probably expected them to be fired and replaced by the time he finished playing in the DC sandbox, and given all the turmoil over there, he was justified to think it! 

All this to say, WB and DC Studios knew exactly what they were getting into with Phillips. Unfortunately, the lesson that’s probably being taken away here is that studios need to exert even more control over their precious IP and give directors even less freedom to play with the characters. But that’s a problem for the next guy who tries to reinvent the Joker.