Would this detail have saved the DC movie from its historic failure?
‘Joker’ is considered one of the best films of the 21st century, a movie echoing the best of Scorsese that resonated with audiences, as shown in our review of ‘Joker’, where we stated that it was “a groundbreaking work that distances itself from the grandiose epic and expansive narrative of its blockbuster peers (from Christopher Nolan’s Batman films to the Marvel Cinematic Universe) to focus on the intimacy of a tragic antihero: a man whose thirst for affection and recognition is shattered by his marginal condition, the dismantling of public services, and the violence of a Gotham reminiscent of the New York in ‘Taxi Driver’ and ‘The King of Comedy’.”
Todd Phillips’ film not only surpassed a billion dollars at the box office but was nominated for eleven Oscars (winning two: Best Actor for Joaquin Phoenix and Best Original Score for Hildur Guðnadóttir).
Five years later, the long-awaited release of its sequel, ‘Joker: Folie à Deux’, arrived, aiming to be one of the best musicals in film history but ended up being one of the notable critical and public failures of 2024, despite unexpected support from major figures like Francis Ford Coppola, who praised ‘Joker 2’, and even Quentin Tarantino. As we noted in our review of ‘Joker 2’, the sequel has greatly divided the original film’s fans.
Maybe too much time had passed between the original film and its sequel, perhaps the audience was somewhat saturated with comic book-based movies, or the average viewer didn’t realize it was going to be a musical (despite it being announced in 2023 that ‘Joker 2’ would, in fact, be a musical). However, in a recent conversation with ‘Empire’, Todd Phillips suggested a possible reason why audiences are increasingly turning to streaming over going to theaters.
Phillips believes that the traditional cinema experience needs to improve to attract audiences again, and he offered a solution:
“Stop playing ads before movies,” he stated. “We paid for our tickets. We’re eager to go. Ads tend to take the magic out of the theater,” the director concluded.
We don’t know if the director of the ‘Hangover’ trilogy is referring to commercials unrelated to movies or if he is also including trailers for upcoming releases, but he has hinted that this prior bombardment of ads may have significantly worsened the experience of watching ‘Joker 2’ in theaters.
