A failure for critics and an economic disaster for the international box office. prankster 2 it’s from afar, the great cinematic disappointment 2024. A condition which had been warned in the face of the disastrous reviews obtained in preview of the Venice Film Festival and because of its high budget of $170 million. The public’s contempt was such that, to minimize the damage, Warner Bros. pulled the film from American billboards, relegating it to the domestic rental market where the studio hopes be able to save the furniturethus increasing the 200 million dollars collected worldwide. But in all this negative whirlwind, the film directed by Todd Phillips found an unexpected ally. To the filmmaker Quentin Tarantino He loved the musical offerings from Joaquin Phoenix and Lady Gaga.
The director of pulp Fiction He’s not a big fan of superhero movies and that’s precisely one of the main points why the sequel to the 2019 blockbuster got him excited. The opinions of Knoxville They tend to be quite personal, often claiming titles that have not traditionally received much reception. Of course, even Tarantino himself has business recommendations. However, the two-time Oscar winner stood out as a great eulogy of disaster for the billboard, as The Lone Ranger was back in the day. So, if the director and screenwriter also Paul Schrader (Taxi driver) said he could not stand more than 25 minutes of prankster 2Tarantino presented an entire thesis in his last interview, fiercely defending the creative courage of the director and his two protagonists, explaining that in reality the director is “the Joker himself”.
Tarantino “liked it a lot”
Compared to the original soundtrack, prankster 2 This is coming out rather badly. The first because it was praised by the Venetian press, taking the Golden Lion in its edition and after, because it ended up bringing in more than 1 billion dollars all over the world. And it is perhaps this lack of expectations which ended up dazzling Tarantino, who was probably not one of the most convinced with the first part.
During the conversation, the award-winning screenwriter pointed out that he had even seen echoes of his script for natural killers and that Phoenix gives “one of the best performances he’s ever seen.” which says a lot because we can ensure openly as Tarantino He saw a lot, a lot of cinema.
“I liked it very, very much”the director began saying in the podcast Bret Easton Ellis of Coil World. An interview where he tells in detail what he experienced in front of the film he disappointed so many fans of the character: “I loved it and I went to see it hoping to be impressed by the production. I thought it was going to be a distanced intellectual exercise that ultimately I don’t think would work as a film, but that I would enjoy for what it is. And I’m nihilist enough to appreciate a film that doesn’t really work as a film (…) I really got carried away. I really liked the musical sequences. I completely got carried away. I thought the more mundane the songs were, the better they were. I find myself listening to the words of For once in my life in a way I’ve never done before.”
Finally, Tarantino explained how prankster 2Gotham’s criminal clown is the director himself: “The Joker directed the film. The whole concept, even the fact that he spends the studio’s money, he spends it like the Joker would spend it (…) He tells them to fuck them all. He tells them to annoy moviegoers. “He tells them to fuck up Hollywood.”
To this day, we still don’t know if the lead from Once Upon a Time in Hollywood will ever return to The film criticwhich was to be his tenth and final film as director. With the failure of prankster 2it seems highly likely that Phillips could work for a major studio again. Meanwhile, Phoenix has three projects ahead of it for 2025; The island, Polaris and Ari Aster’s latest film, Eddington.
