To everyone’s shock, the long-anticipated Joker: Folie à Deux has landed with a thud. While the first film polarized critics, it was a surprise hit, becoming (at the time) the highest-grossing R-rated feature of all time and earning 11 Oscar nominations, two of which it won (notably Best Actor for Joaquin Phoenix). While director Todd Phillips had regularly talked up the original Joker as a one-and-done, its unprecedented success meant a sequel was inevitable.
But what sounded like a surefire hit instead proved the exact opposite. It currently boasts a 33% approval from critics on Rotten Tomatoes, a similarly negative score from users, a “D” CinemaScore rating (the lowest ever for a comic book film), and an opening weekend gross lower than Morbius. Virtually no one seems pleased with Folie à Deux, and it’s hard to pinpoint a single factor for its failure. On paper, the most obvious explanation is the genre shift; Folie à Deux is a musical, which is already a polarizing decision. However, the more telling factor that might have sunk the film is how the studio almost completely hid the musical aspects from the advertising.
Joker: Folie à Deux is the sequel to Todd Phillips’ critically acclaimed comic book thriller Joker. Reprising his Academy Award-winning performance as the failed comedian Arthur Fleck, Joaquin Phoenix revisits the iconic DC character alongside Lady Gaga, who makes her debut as Joker’s lover Harley Quinn in this standalone continuity of the DC Universe.
- Release Date
- October 4, 2024
- Cast
- Joaquin Phoenix , Lady Gaga , Brendan Gleeson , Catherine Keener , Zazie Beetz , Steve Coogan , Harry Lawtey , Leigh Gill , Jacob Lofland , Sharon Washington , Troy Fromin , Bill Smitrovich , John Lacy , Ken Leung
- Runtime
- 138 Minutes
Why Are Movies Hiding That They’re Musicals?
To be completely fair to Joker: Folie à Deux, it’s far from the first movie to go out of its way to hide that it’s a musical. Despite an influx of musicals in the last year alone, like Wonka, The Color Purple, Wish, and the reimagining of Mean Girls, they deliberately hid footage of the actors singing or dancing. Even Wicked, adapted from one of the most popular Broadway musicals of all time, while including the iconic “Defying Gravity” in the trailer, seems to hide the actors actually singing it onscreen.
In the film industry, many allegedly believe that marketing a movie specifically as a musical is akin to a box office death sentence, as executives think the genre has too much negative stigma among mass audiences. It’s not an entirely baseless claim, as 2021 saw both In the Heights and West Side Story, which featured the musical numbers prominently in the trailers, underperform with audiences. And just two years before that, the now-infamous adaptation of Cats proved a historic bomb.
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But there’s still plenty of counter-evidence that being a musical isn’t necessarily a death knell. The last decade has seen the likes of La La Land, Moana, and The Greatest Showman all prove surprise hits, and none of these films were falsely advertised. It also ignores several other significant factors, namely the fact that In the Heights and West Side Story had lackluster marketing campaigns overall or that Cats was an internet punchline months before it crashed and burned.
Nonetheless, it seems like this baseless assumption has become a genuine belief among Hollywood executives if the fact that a musical as widely recognized as Wicked isn’t advertised as such is any indication. And nowhere has this marketing strategy seemed to have backfired as badly as it has with Joker 2.
Hiding the Musical Label Helped Sink Joker 2
Even though Joker: Folie à Deux was revealed to be a jukebox musical the second it was announced (and further emphasized by the casting of Lady Gaga as Harley Quinn, it seemed like the film’s marketing since then went out of its way to hide that from the audience. The trailers featured almost no musical numbers in full, outside of a brief snippet of Joaquin Phoenix singing. Even more bafflingly, the film’s rollout before its premiere at the Venice Film Festival saw both director Todd Phillips and Lady Gaga insist that their movie wasn’t a musical.
Phillips stated, “Most of the music in the movie is really just dialogue. It’s just Arthur not having the words to say what he wants to say, so he sings them instead.” It’s a perplexing statement; what is a musical if not a way to allow characters to express themselves in ways that words can’t? Additionally, critics and fans alike have especially criticized how awkwardly integrated the musical numbers are in Joker 2, as they equate to randomly spliced flights of fancy in an otherwise grounded film. Arguably, Phillips would’ve been better off committing to making a full-blown musical rather than trying to have it both ways.
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But even if Phillips had fully committed to it, would there have ever been an audience for a Joker musical? The original film had gained a vocal following with a somewhat infamous reputation, as onlookers were concerned that a movie about a mentally ill loner lashing out against a system he believed had wronged him could seem like a rallying cry. (It’s important to note that the fears of potential violence at screenings did not end up panning out.) Regardless of whether there’s any truth to the stereotype, it’s hard to imagine many fans being nearly as vocally passionate about the musical genre.
More importantly, the genre shift simply felt too far out of left field. For better or worse, Joker was an almost entirely grounded crime drama advertised as a comic book film, clearly taking more inspiration from Taxi Driver than from Jim Lee. It’s hard to imagine what convinced Phillips and Phoenix that a musical was the logical progression from that. On top of that, virtually nothing in the original film even hints at this shift in direction, resulting in a movie that had almost no path to success as a Joker sequel or as a musical.
Joker 2 Left Audiences Feeling Tricked
As previously mentioned, it’s clear that major studios believe marketing a musical as a musical is too much of a risk to take with general audiences (which raises the question of why they’re even working in the genre to begin with). But if the scathing audience reception to Joker 2 is any indication, it seems it’s actually the opposite.
A musical sequel to Joker was always going to be a tough sell to fans of the original, considering how out of nowhere it felt, even in theory. However, Todd Phillips and Warner Bros. still somehow marketed it in the worst way possible. If they’d advertised the film as its proper genre, it might have turned some audiences off, but it seems an infinitely preferable option to what they went with, which left viewers feeling tricked and helped lead to overwhelmingly poor word of mouth. Here’s hoping the inevitable backlash about Wicked turning out to be a musical won’t turn out quite as brutal. Joker: Folie à Deux is now playing in theaters.