What Do Megalopolis and Joker 2 Have in Common?

Todd Phillips' Joker 2, which one month before its release Boxoffice Pro predicted would open to $115-$145 million, took in a mere $37 million in North America in its opening weekend--or about 30 percent of the low end of the range, and considerably less than even the $50-$60 million the publication predicted the Wednesday of the week of release.

As I said in my prior comment, as collapses went this one was even quicker and harder than what we saw for The Flash. (That movie, the early tracking-based projections for which had indicated an opening comparable to the one once predicted for Joker 2, still took in $55 million in that opening weekend.)

Right now there seems little to no chance of the film being saved by good holds at the box office. As a result there does not seem very much worth saying about the film's box office prospects beyond that. In fact it already seems to me rather more interesting to consider the film's life beyond that--considering which it seems worth mentioning a film that came out just the week before, Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis. Similarly a big-budget event that mostly put off critics and failed to attract audiences in part because of its maker's bucking expectations, the reaction to Megalopolis can seem to recall prior experiences Coppola had in the past, not least with Apocalypse Now. That movie, which was treated as far from being a success on release, was, along with Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate, bashed by critics in a fashion that killed its maker's career, and helped kill the more auteur-driven "New Hollywood," in large part because the studios wanted this done, and their courtiers in the press deferentially did their part.

Could something like that be going on here?

Consider the situation as it really stands now. In spite of much crowing by its courtiers over the occasional hit Hollywood is now in the fifth year of perhaps the most profound period of crisis in its history as a result of the coronavirus pandemic dealing its business, already in a fragile and declining state, an unprecedented shock. This seemed all the more the case as 2023, if the best year for business since before the pandemic, saw the kinds of hits Hollywood conventionally mass-produces (franchise-based big-budget sci-fi action spectacles and splashy family animation) flop again and again, implying the end of a model of filmmaking it cannot easily replace. At the same time what successes the studio had were largely a matter of more idiosyncratic films--some of them, notably, readable as (love or hate them) "visionary" auteur films, like Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer and Greta Gerwig's Barbie.

Amid all this it did not seem impossible that the Suits, desperate for movies that would sell tickets, would find themselves having to loosen their grip on the filmmakers who actually deliver what the crass Wall Street henchmen disrespectfully call "content," New Hollywood-style, a prospect they of course find loathsome. The result was that the courtiers were ecstatic when Inside Out 2 and Deadpool & Wolverine seemed to demonstrate the continued viability of their accustomed way of doing things--while few shed any tears for the failure of Megalopolis (the more in as the business has never forgiven him for how he once fought the studio system), all as, if Warner Bros.' can hardly be happy with losing money on Joker 2, the industry as a whole may not be displeased to see an auteurial oddity like that fail (with this going double for those of their courtiers who hated the first Joker, and must be getting satisfaction from the sequel's failure).

Indeed, the comment regarding these films, particularly Joker 2, would seem to be hewing to the standard script used in hatchet jobs on New Hollywood auteurs targeted for purging. The moaning about the movie's budget. The predictable bad reviews. And then in the wake of (given how this is the kind of film that can really be helped or hurt by the reviewers) a predictable commercial failure a likewise predictable laying of all the blame for the problem on the director, not least through a portrayal of the film's helmer as an egomaniac trading on past success to get his way on everything and using that latitude to supposedly "pursue a vision" but really just hubristically making a muck of things without the "adults in the room" to supervise him.

Of course, as the examples of Apocalypse Now and Heaven's Gate show, such movies sometimes gain in esteem, both films now esteemed as masterpieces. Will Coppola's new movie eventually redeemed the way Apocalypse Now was? And Joker 2 as well? I think it far too early to say--though the more positive appraisals of both those films at least hint at that possibility.

Why Writers Hate Summarizing Their Work

It is a notorious fact that writers--especially writers of fiction--hate summarizing their work. However, there is less discussion of why this is the case, with certain idiots seeing writers' distaste for the activity as simply another reason to mock at the sensibility of "creative" types.

Nevertheless, considering the writing of summaries for works like novels it is actually very easy to understand why writers so dislike going about this task, with three reasons especially worth discussing.

1. When a Writer is Finished with a Work They are Likely to be Desperate to be Done with it--and Writing a Summary Forces Them to Go Back to it Instead.
Consider the situation of someone who has written a long work like a novel. The sheer length of the work all but guarantees a long process, and therefore an exhausting one, the more in as the stages of a writing process are not all the same, with the beginning apt to be easier than the end--the bits that come naturally, easily, pleasurably concentrated at the start, getting fewer as they go along, and the later part of the process a slog as they complete the bits that they may not actually care to write at all if given the choice, but which they regard themselves as forced to write for the sake of completing the project. (They liked writing that scene, and that scene, but not so much this scene they needed to connect the two so that it all coheres.) This is all the more the case if they are the kind of writer who finds themselves compelled to rewrite a great deal, and especially rewrite as they go along--finding themselves fleshing out earlier material, making changes in the course of their writing that force them to go back and make alterations, etc., spending hours and hours working arduously on something they thought (or at least, hoped) was done, and in doing so giving a very great deal to achieve what may on the page look like a very little improvement (and might, on later reflection, seem no improvement at all). Indeed, it has seemed to me that the "80/20 principle" applies in writing fiction and nonfiction just as it does in writing code.

Contrary to what those who love to preach puritanical homilies would have you believe, the exhaustion that comes with the hard work does not make finishing the job more satisfying, but less so, apt to befoul their mood, all as they likely face disappointment in how things turned out--the gap between their Platonic image of how they wanted the thing to be, and what they actually have (no matter how good it may actually be). A writer's being in such a state of weltschmerz is all the more reason for them to not want to think about the thing anymore--the more in as they may be the kind who have a tough time "letting go"--but no, they have to go back and write the summary, which task entails its own miseries.

2. Writing a Summary Means a Writer's Taking a Cold, Hard, Look at Their Work--and Sucking Everything Interesting Out of It.
In considering the task of writing a good summary one ought to contrast that particular writing process with what writers tend to really enjoy about the writing process--its spontaneous, unconscious, intuitive aspect in which, as their brain fires on all cylinders and they feel themselves in a "flow state," the words just pouring out of them.

By contrast writing a summary of anything is likely to be a very deliberate, conscious process--and the writing of a summary of their own work require them to be not just conscious but self-conscious about their own writing. A painful and often inhibiting thing, touching their every insecurity (writers do need a capacity of self-criticism, but I think a writer's enduring too much self-criticism hurts their creativity, and very often squashes it altogether), it is, again, likely to be coming at a moment when they would least like to look at it or think about it, that period of weltschmerz after a long project, with all this does to worsen the experience.

Moreover, the act of summarizing itself is apt to make them feel worse rather than better about what they have written--because the summary is apt to strip away everything of which they were proud to leave something simple and dry and banal on the page. Consider, for example, what David Walsh has accounted the greatest work of American literature ever produced, Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy. Even Dreiser's greatest admirers will not attempt to persuade anyone that he deserves renown as a stylist (indeed, literary snobs sniff at his "journalistic" prose), but there is no question that the interest of his story of a murder is all in the telling--the way in which Dreiser tells the tale of Clyde Griffiths up to the point of the crime, "painstakingly and painfully buil[ding] up" to it "inexorable incident by inexorable incident," and in the process makes what can appear a very ordinary (if also horrible and ugly) crime an indictment of a whole society. But in the summary you won't get any sense of that buildup or that indictment, or the "frightening power" it all has for many a reader, just that commonplace-seeming crime--a grave injustice to the work, with, in a writer's producing the summary themselves, they the one committing the injustice, again at this emotional low point, with this all the more problematic because of why they are doing so in the first place.

3. Writers Aren't All Natural-Born Salesmen (Often They are the Extreme Opposite)--and Being a Salesman for Their Own Work is Especially Painful.
Why is a writer apt to be summarizing their work? The most likely reason is that they are trying to interest others in it--with the principal reason for subjecting themselves to that particular bit of wretchedness the desire to make a career of their writing, most likely by sending blind submissions to the slush piles of the few publishing houses and literary agencies that even go through the hypocrisy of claiming to be willing to look at such things, a process that commonly requires the writing of summaries. They are "selling" their work--an activity that is not the same for everyone. Selling is an outgoing, aggressive, often rejection-filled and emotionally bruising activity. Even the extroverted and thick-skinned get their fill of this, burning out on the job, while in spite of society's demand that its members all be extroverted and thick-skinned in this way and its attempts to induce them to all be so (hammering the square peg into the round hole from the start of their schooling, if not earlier), people commonly grow up to be the very opposite in temperament, introverted and thin-skinned--while I dare say that these traits are even more common among writers than they are among the generality of the public. (After all, someone who hates being alone isn't likely to get much writing done, and likely wouldn't bother to try to write much if they didn't have some sensitivity to the world around them, while at least one attraction of a career as a writer for many is that they will be able to in at least some measure retreat from the world and its brutalities.)

Making matters worse is the fact that, in a state in which the writer may be feeling disappointed in and insecure about their work, as they are apt to feel at the end of a project, the thought of their career compels them to go and sell that work, often as quickly as possible after getting the work into passable shape. Greatly amplifying the unpleasantness of it all is the fact that a writer in so marginal a position relative to their market that they have to send blind submissions to slush piles is likely to quickly amass a mountain of dispiriting experiences of the kind that Jack London wrote about so frankly and illuminatingly in Martin Eden, endured without support or sympathy from anyone. The misery of the attempts accumulates with each try, the more in as they have again and again seen no reward, the hard work not paying off, so that an increasing sense of futility sets in--that emotional baggage apt to be part of the experience of summarizing what they have written, giving them that much more reason to hate the task. Indeed, I suspect that the misery of the sales process, of which summary-writing is a part, has probably killed off a very great number of literary careers before they ever properly began, and at least some of those murders have surely left world culture the poorer--not that the Dauriats of Park Avenue, or the lickspittles who fly to their defense on hearing the slightest criticism of them, will ever admit such a thing.

If the Horse Race isn't a Nail-Biter the News Media Will Say That's What it is Anyway

The news media's propensity for presenting elections as "horse races" is notorious--and rightly so. The attitude reflects that media's operatives' preference for politics over policy, and personalities over issues--and for that matter, the nuts and bolts of governance that confront any elected official with profound limits to their power. The same attitude also reflects their susceptibility to being dazzled by "showbusiness for ugly people" (let us make that "showbusiness for ugly, talentless and uncharismatic people"), and their delusion that the broad public is similarly susceptible to being dazzled--which is yet another reminder of how remote from that public and its actual concerns they really are, and one might add, how profoundly irresponsible they are given what the stakes of elections are supposed to be.

Of course, as the notoriety of the tendency would lead one to expect, many have criticized this specific aspect of the news media's conduct over the years--to absolutely no effect on its behavior whatsoever, as tends to be the case with criticisms of the media and other institutions by anyone with a modicum of intelligence. The result was that when Robert Reich recently wrote in the Guardian about what seems to him the surprisingly close character of the year's "race" for the White House, and he dismissed the idea that "the media is intentionally creating a nail-bitingly close race in order to sell more ads" I thought him overly hasty in doing so. After all, faced with the possibility that their audience is losing interest those in showbusiness, for ugly people or the regular kind, seem to mainly think of doing the same thing they were doing before, but BIGGER! Thus does a media which favors the narrative of the "nail-bitingly close" race push that narrative even when it has no basis in reality whatsoever.

Does that mean that this is actually the case now, that the media is only making the race look "nail-bitingly close?" I do not know that. What I do mean to say is that this is what they have been known to do when such races have not conformed to their preferred style of campaign coverage, and what they can be expected to go on doing when that is the case, such that the possibility should not be dismissed out of hand the way Reich dismisses it--and that people of all political persuasions should think long and hard about this bit of media idiocy when considering what and what not to believe.

The Densha Otoko Controversy of Two Decades Ago, and the Culture Wars of Tomorrow

Back in 2004 there were (we are given to understand) a series of postings in an Internet forum by an individual telling the (supposedly) real-life story of a twentysomething "otaku" who becomes romantically involved with a woman he rescued from a groper on the train, over the course of which postings sympathetic readers helped him with advice along a path that led him to put otakuish things behind him and join the mainstream in order to be with here. Novelized as Densha Otoko (translatable as Train Man), the book became a bestseller that quickly launched a popular multimedia franchise that included a TV series, a feature film, and several manga adaptations.

All this may sound innocuous enough to Americans hearing about it, the man who has "failed to grow up" (which is how the "geeky" and "nerdy" tend to be seen in America) but finds love, puts away "childish things" and remakes himself according to mainstream standards (getting a "good" job if he doesn't already have one, getting a "makeover," just like that somehow) is a standard plot formula, and indeed well-worn cliché, as a result of its use as the basis of any number of independent films, Judd Apatow comedies, etc.. However, it was not received that way by Japanese otaku, who unlike their counterparts in supposedly less conformist America attacked the conformist message of this narrative formula--the view that otaku are not what they ought to be, that they can, should and must abandon their interests and pleasures and join the mainstream in any and every way, "because reasons." Indeed, the furor was sufficient that a previously obscure man named Toru Honda became famous on the basis of his version of the critique (apparently, a bestseller as these things go), which held that like everything else love had dissolved in capitalism's cash nexus, which also devalued human beings who do not meet its standards and serve its purposes (those without money and other desired traits)--and that it was entirely valid for those who had no place in that order (who did not, because they could not, work and have children) to find their satisfaction in those "childish things," and even take "2-D love" with fictional characters in place of a "3-D" relationship with another human being that, even when it was attainable, was not necessarily more "real," and perhaps less so, certainly less pure. (In spite of his references to capitalism his taste in philosophical reference--Plato, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, etc.--is suggestive of an inclination toward an idealist-subjectivist ontology, and the individual's "getting along" as best they can in society as they find it, rather than any project of social change, with his one hazy reference to Marxism as "in decline" implying that he is dismissive of such notions.)

All of this has had little attention in the West, both Densha Otoko, and the outpouring of writing that followed it, even his best-known works remaining without any authorized translation, and secondhand discussion slight. (Indeed, a handful of translated interviews apart--the highest-profile of which was with the Asahi Shimbun in 2005--most of what there is to read about Honda and his ideas in English is to be found on comparatively obscure blogs referencing at best a portion of his work.) This is, I think, partly because of the extreme disinterest of American cultural commentators in social life in other countries (i.e. save when they can use it to show the "badness" of some state policy elites want to designate as an enemy), but also because his ideas offend against those of the mainstream in multiple ways, and even seem too "bizarre" for them to take seriously. Indeed, looking at the comment threads on blogs discussing Honda's ideas I constantly found Honda dismissed as a "pseduointellectual" wrapping up retrograde thinking in "first year philosophy student" references--with the fact that this reading was asserted rather than argued, and rarely challenged, confirming the ease with which many incline to this view. Still, given how many of the relevant issues--growing questioning of a vision of adulthood that seems less attainable and perhaps less desirable to young people in the straitened times, the country's fraught gender politics, and even advances in artificial intelligence that may well make it a source of companionship for many--we may yet see argument for views like Honda's become part of cultural controversy in America.

The Collapse of Joker 2's Box Office Prospects: Do We Have Another The Flash On Our Hands?

I have, I think, been less bullish on Joker 2 than others since I started following the news about it. While acknowledging the colossal success of the original and the factors that may make a follow-up similarly successful (indeed, last year the film seemed to me the year's best chance for a billion-dollar hit), I have also remarked again and again all it had going against it. Not the least of this was the extent to which the first film was a beneficiary of a rare moral panic-fed barrage of hype, and it increasingly seems, a bait-and-switch selling the story of Arthur Fleck as a Joker origin story--neither of which will be as helpful this time, all as the media may not be terribly friendly (a lot of the opinion-makers feared and hated the film and may be looking for revenge this time around), while there is an undeniable gamble in making what looks less like Joker 2 than Arthur Fleck II: The Musical (All talking! All singing!), with the precedent of Joker producer Martin Scorsese's following up Taxi Driver with New York, New York inauspicious. Indeed, if I saw the first Boxoffice Pro forecast for the film's opening ($115-$145 million) as portending the film's possibly matching its predecessor, I wrote that

the question now is which way the interest will go in the next month--whether we will see it collapse, hold steady or even surge, and then after that, just how audiences will respond to the movie when they do see it.

The following week, alas, we saw the range collapse, from $115-$145 million to just $60-$100 million, and then $60-$90 million the week after that. And things got worse still over the following two weeks, with the just published forecast of the week of release presenting a range of just $50-$60 million for the opening weekend.

About 40 percent of what the forecasters expected a mere month earlier, this is a faster, farther drop to a lower point than was even seen with The Flash, for which the same publication anticipated a very similar $115-$140 million initially, and then watched the prediction decline to $72-$105 million by the last, long-range, forecast, all as the forecast from the Wednesday before opening day predicted, at worst, $69 million.

Of course, a movie may disappoint on opening weekend and be rescued by "good legs," and/or the international market, but the opposite seems more likely to be the case when there is such a trend. Certainly it didn't happen for The Flash. That movie opened to $55 million, and did not quite manage to double that domestically (finishing out at $108 million), while if it did a bit better overseas this was only in the sense that there was a relatively decent foreign take relative to the domestic one, which worked out to a global total of $271 million. The result was almost certainly a nine figure loss for the studio, and possibly the biggest flop of the year (my math indicating at least the possibility that The Flash and not the even lower-grossing, couldn't-make-it-to-the-$100-million-mark-in-North-America Captain Marvel 2 registered the biggest net loss for its backer).

In the worst-case scenario Joker 2 seems to me now in danger of making no more than The Flash did, all while having a $200 million production budget (triple the original Joker's, and approximately what The Flash was at least initially reported as running its backers). The result is that this movie, which such a short while ago looked as if it could be one of the saviors of the weak 2024 box office, could instead serve as yet another reminder that even if they can still score big (as the dynamic duo of Deadpool and Wolverine did this past summer) big sequels like this one are less reliable performers than they used to be in today's shrunken North American and global film market, as it not only makes its way onto Deadline's list of the biggest flops next year, but very possibly goes to the very top of that list. Possibly, I say, because it may yet have some competition for the dubious honor of that list's #1 spot given the number of high-risk big releases due out this fall in the present, rather finite, market (not least Gladiator 2, the first forecasts for which we may start to hear about very soon).