Can Joker 2 be a Hit?

Todd Phillips' Joker was the kind of unconventional movie that somehow gets made every now and then--and once in a while proves a surprise blockbuster, 2019's equivalent of Oppenheimer or Barbie. Still, there has been a good deal of argument over why the relatively small, dark, unconventional film became a billion-dollar hit--whether it was a matter of its genuine cinematic merits, or rather the way that the coprophages and claqueurs of the entertainment press generated around it the biggest moral panic over a major feature film in many years in which they disgraced themselves with their advertisement of their own stupidity, and disgraced themselves yet again with their not always thinly veiled calls for censorship.

This in itself raises questions about how the sequel (Joker: Folie à Deux) coming a whole five years after that arguably unrepeatable moment could be expected to do--with this all the more the case in as there is a shift of genre, from gritty urban drama with a socially critical edge, to offbeat musical love story. What gave the film, for all its imperfections, a real charge in its best moments, could easily fall by the wayside here--all as the shift has me in mind of how Martin Scorsese, of whose work Joker was derivative to a fault, followed up his huge success with Taxi Driver with his big-budget musical flop, New York, New York.* But then again this franchise might just pull off the rare feat of surprising us all a second time.

* Peter Biskind recounts the tale in Easy Riders, Raging Bulls.