ACE OF SPADES: Woke $200+ Million Joker Sequel Brings In a “Tragic” $37.8 Million in Opening Weekend Disaster.
The movie made $80 million overseas, which sounds good until you compare it with the first film’s opening weekend overseas takings — $136 million.
Many were saying the film is a deliberate “F*** You” to the audience that supported the original.
Even leftwing fake news outlet Rolling Stone admits this now:
The audience did not appreciate this sentiment. Cinemascore polls theater-goers as they exit a movie, handing them cards to grade the film. Grace Randolph said that “D” is the lowest rating on the card. They don’t allow F’s.
Joker 2’s grade? A D. It’s the first comic book movie to receive this grade– and there have been many, many terrible comic book movies, of course.
But I guess people don’t like being told to go f*** themselves.
Who knew?
It has long, long been the case that Stunning and Brave Artistes think they are above making genre fare. To signal that they are superior to the films (or comic books) they’re making, they deliberately subvert them, crack jokes about them in the films and books themselves, and otherwise signal that this is very stupid material, and therefore the audience is also stupid for attempting to enjoy it.
Actually, I thought the first film, was a gigantic FY to Batman fans, with its rehash of far superior Scorsese films like Taxi Driver and King of Comedy and their disgusting ’70s-era New York milieus being recycled this time around to serve as the backstory of a comic book supervillain with a painted face and green fright wig once portrayed by Cesar Romero. I sat through it once when it came to Amazon Prime, given what a cultural phenomenon Joker was at the multiplexes in 2019 (the year before the world came to an end). Not having a very pleasant time watching the movie, I had no desire to sign up again for the same ride. As Ace notes:
As I mentioned on Friday, Todd Philips had a different goal here. He had been attacked by the Permanent Twitter Residents for supposedly “inciting incels” to commit violence, and, even worse, telling men that felt excluded from society that others understood their pain.
The much-predicted violence never happened — but the leftwing Mean Girls still attacked him for attempting to say something about marginalized men.
And so Todd Phillips made a movie for this new Phantom Audience that didn’t and never will exist — the film was made for people who hated the first Joker, and was intended not as a movie but an apology for having made the first one.
And now he’s got a disaster on his hands. Warner Bros. will lose a hundred million or more on this disaster.
But the important thing is that Todd Phillips signaled to the right people that he agrees with them.
With the possible exception of Star Trek II, nobody goes to a sequel because they hated the first movie, and even there, there were enough people who wanted to see Kirk, Spock, McCoy and Scotty because of their enormous good will they built up from three TV seasons and a decade’s worth of reruns, and a ponderous but epic and well-intentioned first movie. The first Joker had no good will to give, as Warner Brothers has found out the hard way.
