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Notes -
It kind of reminds of Cop Rock. I actually watched this when it aired.
It was awful. So hilariously bad no one could believe they actually produced this. But at the time, I had to give them credit for at least trying something original. Hollywood so rarely comes up with an original idea, I can't blame them too hard when they fail.
So yeah, when I heard about a Joker musical with Lady Gaga, I thought it sounded insane, but also maybe crazy in a good way?
Unfortunately not, but I still think the idea that they did this to punish fans who liked the first movie is even more crazy. "We made a blockbuster hit, but the wrong people liked it, so let's make a terrible movie that says fuck you to all the people who made the first movie profitable" is a thought that only makes sense in a dark fetid place.
Even when people are hostile to the original work and its fans, they aren't trying to tank its success or being indifferent to it. Take Paul Verhoeven, who made the original Starship Troopers movie and famously despised the book, thought Heinlein was a fascist, and probably would have been quite happy to say "fuck you" to Heinlein fans. He still made a movie that he thought would appeal to an audience that didn't care about fidelity to the book. The movie was hilariously bad* but not because he was trying to make sure Heinlein fans wouldn't like it.
* Actually I liked it and thought for all Verhoeven's blinkered misunderstanding of the book, he did capture some of its essence, even if unintentionally. It was bad in a campy, so-bad-it's-good way. Ironically it's now kind of a cult classic, spawned multiple sequels, and has been criticized for being too pro-military. All of which I bring up by way of saying, a simple black and white model of reality in which the entire creative team says "Hey kids, let's put on a show - and say fuck you to any bad people who might like it!" is an example of how conflict theory can degenerate to a childish understanding of the world.
Killing off successful and profitable media because the wrong audience is enjoying it is far from historically unprecedented. The rural purge of the 1970s that killed off a dominant genre of broadcasting basically on the grounds that TV executives who didn't like rural TV wanted a different audience.
True, but there is a difference between killing something because you don't care that the (wrong) audience likes it, and funding something you expect to fail just so you can stick a thumb in the audience's eye. The equivalent here would be just... not making a sequel, despite the obvious potential, rather than making a sequel that's deliberately shitty because you're angry at the people who liked the first one.
I also doubt that the Joker became a hit on the strength of angry disaffected young white men, even if some movie critics think so. Thus, I am very skeptical of the narrative that the studios said, "Whoa! We'd better fix this!" when they saw who bought tickets the first time.
You are assuming not only that the expectation is that it would fail, but that this expectations is excused by a particular reasoning. Neither end of that has to apply, especially if you get into internal political dynamics over competition for resources and future developments. Poison pill strategies and setting projects up to fail or flounder as a means to a separate end are banal workplace dynamics.
Setting up something you don't like to fail, and publicly so, is a classic way to delegitimize something you don't like. It places an onus and responsibility on the nominal lead advocates both for it to succeed and if/when it fails, whereas complaints that failure is the fault of insufficient support is a classically and generally dismissed claim of the loser of a bureacratic fight. Since executive meddling is an extremely normal and non-controversial practice at the executive level, the advocates trying to problematize execute handling are implicitly casting accusations at more than just the interested meddler, which in turn draws a bandwagon effect by others because if executive meddling is a censorable act, it means those other executives would be acknowledging grounds for their own censoring.
I’ll also point out that there aren’t a lot of alternatives right now with the reach and scale of Hollywood and as such it’s a lot like pro sports. Yes there are minor leagues, or maybe college sports but most often people only choose them when they don’t have easy access to the big leagues and almost no one would deliberately choose the small leagues when given the option to see major league teams.
In movies, a lot of this is based around intellectual property— there are very few space stories that you can do without tripping over something owned by a big studio somewhere. Most superhero types have something like them in either the Marvel or DC catalog. And on it goes. So you either go with small movie houses — either indies or Christian, or possibly foreign, made by people who didn’t quite make it, or you go see a blockbuster made by the usual suspects who will own all the rights to those kinds of films and shows until the end of time. If this iteration of Joker fails, who cares, we own the rights and in five or ten years we make a different Joker movie. Not like anyone else owns the right to make movies about evil clowns like this.
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