Know Your Place Echo Males!
Joker 2 (no I won’t call it by its proper name) is a disaster at the box office and I’m pretty sure everyone is Hollywood is delighted.
The Joker was a massive surprise hit Todd Phillips and Joaquin Phoenix had just wanted to make their own Martin Scorsese film. By putting Di Niro in it, the two were basically saying we are remaking Taxi Driver.
Nobody would have funded that, so they made a superhero skinsuit movie. Just change a few names and wouldn’t have been a Joker movie at all.
However, Joker resonated with society’s designated out-group. Every society has one, this is the group that everyone can agree is just plain awful. In America, it changes from time to time. It used to be Blacks, then Irish, then Italians but now it is the young single white male. 33% percent of men under 30 are unemployed, a larger number are under-employed, and 27% are involuntarily celibate. 35% of college graduates are male. Normally this would be a formula for spontaneous uprisings, however, in a first-world economy, the Echo Male can be kept comatose by video games, pornography, and prescription drugs for depression. Plus recreational drugs.
But Joker meant something to these young men and that scared the living shit out of Clown World. There was an all-out effort by the media to convince people to stay away because they were going to numerous mass shootings at movie theaters.
That didn’t happen and the movie made a billion dollars but not for Warner Brothers. After a second round of mass executions at Warner Brothers following the Justice League disaster, Walter Hamada was hired in a panic. He made all of the same screwups that Marvel was making and it didn’t work out for him either. He might have been forgiven for this but it was what he did on his own that sealed his fate. He sold off the revenues for Joker. Hollywood profit sharing is usually a chump’s bet for the buyer but every now and then the dark horse finds the inside lane and comes in first. And the bookie who sold the layoff bet goes to the cleaners. When Joker hit it out of the park, Hamada cost Warner Brothers a billion dollars when most it needed a billion dollars. He was done then. Hamada was kept around to be fired after the next box office bomb. Black Adam met those qualifications with flying colors and he was out the door.
He had however greenlit Joker 2.
The problem is that Joker was self-contained as a story and didn’t set itself up for a sequel. Joaquin Phoenix was cool with the idea because he was having weird and trippy ideas about making a musical. Nobody else knew what to do with it so, they went with that.
There was absolutely no need whatsoever for a $200 million budget. Sure there would have been demands for higher salaries but they weren’t going to okay something that high. Unless, of course, the money wasn’t going into the production. I suspect but can not at all prove that there were some pretty big kickbacks that went into the pockets of those who delivered what Clown World wanted.
Namely, a film that destroyed the previous film. Which this one did magnificently. The powerful, city-shaking Joker from the previous film was turned back into the hapless and helpless Arthur Fleck. Fleck confesses in court that Joker was just a mask that he was wearing and he really is just Arthur Fleck.
Harley Quinn dumps him because he’s not the Joker.
He is literally gang raped by prison guards.
Finally, he is stabbed to death at the end of the movie.
This is a film that was made to put The Joker’s audience in its place. It is saying you are nothing, you never could be anything. You’re trash and this is what happens to trash that forgets that it’s trash.
The jokes on them. Absolutely no one is seeing this movie and you’re only trash if you let yourself get thrown away.
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