It’s SHOW / BUSINESS
Warner Bros. Pictures
NO SPOILERS INCLUDED BELOW and please don’t spoil for others in comments.
I finally saw Joker: Folie à Deux.
It’s a film that has split audience and critic opinion. Personally I enjoyed it—not in the same way I enjoyed the first Joker (which I consider a masterpiece), but it moved me. I had fun. It had beauty and artistry. The first Joker (2019) was a critical and financial success.
But this isn’t really an article about the Joker movie or Folie à Deux or whether I liked it and you did or didn’t.
It’s about risk. It’s about art.
The first Joker film was not riding the wave of superhero movie success of the last decade. It was a bunch of artists doing something they wanted to do (albeit for a major studio with a known character). It connected with audiences. It made a billion dollars.
Folie à Deux is also a piece of art made by artists trying something creatively. It landed differently with different people.
For all the experience of the Hollywood industry, artistic value is subjective. In an art form like film, that can be committed to a medium and rewatched (unlike live performance), its value and commercial success can be reevaluated over time.
Film can be an expensive art form to make. Its roots in theatre and changing models of distribution (from exhibition in cinemas to television to video rental to streaming) highlight that the business of show constantly shifts as the technology shifts and audiences change how they get to see the show. We constantly reshape how we make the business model work.
This is show business. It’s unpredictable. None of us really knows anything, and when we do it changes, proving we don’t.
But it’s also about the show. I want to see and hear new exciting art from artists that make me laugh and cry and feel and think.
When I was studying film in the ’90s, we already knew that the success of 1 in 10 “cultural products” would end up offsetting the losses on the others. And if it’s your production slate, then you do need an idea of where to place your bets. But the point of a portfolio was to spread the risk. Over the past two decades, we’ve seen an appetite for risk diminish, with Hollywood investment skewing towards the global blockbuster franchise to try and manage risk. At the same time, we have seen a radical shift in how people watch films when they want, away from traditional theatrical distribution, up-ending the old model.
As writer/director Cord Jefferson said in his 2024 Oscar speech for American Fiction: “I understand that this is a risk-averse industry, I get it. But $200 million movies are also a risk. And it doesn’t always work out, but you take the risk anyway. Instead of making one $200 million movie, try making twenty $10 million movies. Or fifty $4 million movies.”
So whether you work in commercial film financing or state art subsidy, please consider creating more opportunities for more artists to take risks. It’s not just about new voices; it’s about trying new things. Give opportunities to people trying something new.
Because none of us know what the next success will be. Let’s experiment. Let’s create great art. Let’s put the show back in show business.