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.