Joker 2 Director Puts Fans In Their Place
Like the first movie, Joker 2 is directed by Todd Phillips, the Hollywood whiz kid who turned The Hangover into a blockbuster film franchise. Such success means the director never hesitates to speak his mind, and in a recent interview, he called out the people speculating that his sequel might cost as high as $200 million. “I read these stories, and it seems like they’re on the side of the multinational corporations,” he said before asking why Joker fans aren’t excited about the money being used so “a bunch of crew people…can then feed their families.”
Focusing On The Budget
What prompted Todd Philips to go off on alleged Joker fans was a discussion about the cost of his upcoming sequel. The first Joker movie was made for $55 million and went on to earn more than a billion dollars at the box office, making it far more successful than the DCEU that this film had no part of.
It’s unclear exactly how much of a higher budget Joker 2 has, but rather than directly answering that question, the director pointed out what a strange question it is to focus on.
Fans Or Studio Executives?
During the interview, Todd Phillips mentioned a question that he frequently hears from audiences: “Why does it cost so much?” The director noted how such audiences don’t sound like Joker fans so much as “they sound like studio executives.”
That’s when he asked “shouldn’t people be happy that we got this money out of [Warner-Discover],” especially when that money is then used to hire talented crew members who need the cash to “feed their families.”
Profit Does Not Equal Worth
While Todd Phillips doesn’t seem like a guy who likes to wade into film discourse (outside of that time he complained about “woke culture,” at least), his complaint goes right to the heart of how many people examine filmmaking from the outside looking in.
For example, many Joker fans fixate on the numbers, pointing out (as we admittedly just did) what a success the first movie was relative to its budget. There’s nothing wrong with cheering for movies to succeed, but this kind of fixation on profit eventually leads to a culture where many fans think a movie’s worth and its profits are one and the same.
The People Who Made Joker 2 Need To Eat
This would normally be the part where we’d give you the hard sell that movies are works of art and that even the biggest box office bombs are worth the world to certain fans all around the world.
Todd Phillips, however, takes a more practical approach in pointing out that every single dollar that he manages to wrangle from the studio is used to hire talented people who, in turn, use that money to help their families.
The director wanted us to know that while rumors of Joker 2 costing $200 million are “absurd,” fans focusing on how much the director is spending are missing the forest for the trees.
And while megastars like Joquin Phoenix and Lady Gaga may not need the money, countless crew members need every buck they can get.
Joker 2 Will Hopefully Be Worth It
It’s honestly kind of refreshing to hear that successful millionaire Todd Phillips has not lost sight of how important money is to the crew members bringing his movies to life. Joker 2 may or may not be as successful as the first movie, but he knows that fan debate over budgets is useless in the face of artists just trying to feed their families.
That’s enough to make us smile right along with Arthur Fleck, and our grin will just be getting bigger if Phillips manages to do what millions of Twitter users have failed to do: transform film discourse for the better.
Source: Variety
You must log in to post a comment