Joker: Folie à Deux It’s a box office disaster or at least that’s what’s being predicted from the present moment. economic disaster that the film achieved in its first weekend on the billboard. These results are certainly predictable, if we take into account the large budget of the project and the poor reception of specialist review since its first screening at the Venice Film Festival. However, even though with these two forks the result of the sequel’s promotional mishap can be perfectly explained, perhaps there is a more important reason than no support the villain receives by its own community of fans. This is nothing other than a double betrayal of the director Todd Phillips to the essence of the character.
While it may seem like this is a criticism attributable solely to the lack of fidelity to the DC cartoons, Joker: Folie à Deux This is in fact a new exercise in hypocrisy which starts from deny the world of comics and at the same time, use the commercial appeal of using Batman’s nemesis. Something that Phillips himself organized, through the realist tendency which permeated the beginnings of the Dark Knight by Christopher Nolan and the idea of bringing the criminal clown into a nihilistic drama that unabashedly embraces the filmography of Martin Scorsese. The play, on the other hand, didn’t go bad at all at first. joker was a critical and public success, bringing in more than 1 billion dollars for the coffers of Warner Bros. However, on this occasion, the adaptation had the surprise of being an atypical film of a genre which already reached a certain saturation among viewers. However, since the announcement of the unexpected sequel, the debate has resurfaced on the little sense of detaching itself from the mythology of the emblematic criminal created by Bill Finger, Bob Kane and Jerry Robinsonwhile on the other hand the character could have been baptized with a name invented for the occasion.
Now this dilemma has been resolved by the director himself, who, as if he were the Joker himself, gave an explanation the subject is so chaotic as DC Comics’ most famous antagonist could do.
He was never the Joker
Phillips’ words that controversy sparked They emerge from one of his last interviews. This is not the first time that the American director has very clearly shown the little attention he pays to the pages of comic books. But I’ve never expressed myself so openly “the little Joker” What is this Joker?
“It’s always been Arthur Fleck; It is never this idea that was imposed on him, this idea that the people of Gotham imposed on him, that he represents. “It’s an unintentional icon,” the author said Weekly Entertainment. Statements responded to online by hundreds of people who criticized the reasoning. From the arguments which explain why the film is called that, to those which Phillips nicknamed the real Joker that he “breathed” it into the public.
Todd Phillips wanted nothing to do with DC
Todd Phillips’ rejection of the Joker is not merely narrative, but one responsible for the trilogy of Hangover he also didn’t want to have nothing to do with DC. From what he said Varietywhen executing Joker: Folie à DeuxPhillips refused to receive no communication from James Gunn and only communicated with Warner Bros executives and executive producers Michael De Luca and Pam Abdy. In fact, internally there is some tension between the department responsible for DC and the director, since, for example, he did not show the studio logo at the start of this sequel.
“If the first film was about a down-on-his-luck, mentally ill man living in an oppressed city, it would gross about $150 million worldwide, not a billion. “People went there because this guy was the Joker,” he explained. an internal source of Variety about tensions with Phillips.
According to the creative strategy of Gunn and Peter Safran, Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker and Robert Pattinson’s Batman both belong to the so-called Elsewhere worldsa series of stories that will take place in a completely different world from the new DC Universe that Gunn himself will present in 2026, with the premiere of Superman: Legacy. It is said that the The Batman 2 will bring back Barry Keoghan as the new Joker.
In the meantime, it remains to be seen whether the drift of Joker: Folie à Deux Ultimately, it’s not the economic debacle expected, showing Phillips as the first director capable of making a character so appealing to audiences. stop being interested to the film community.
