Warner Bros is trying very hard to escape the “Joker 2 is a musical” allegations – so why did Todd Phillips put a bunch of songs in it?
During a Venice press conference last week, Lady Gaga raised a few eyebrows when she said she doesn’t consider her new film, Joker: Folie à Deux, to be a musical.
“The music,” she said, by way of explanation, “is used to really give the characters a way to express what they need to say – because the scene and dialogue is just not enough.”
In a 2007 conversation with Judy Kaye and Wiley Hausam on PBS, Ben Wattenberg referred to an old musical theatre maxim: “When the emotion becomes too strong for speech, you sing; when it becomes too strong for song, you dance.”
The same phrase appears on the GCSE Drama syllabus, Laura Benanti said it to Playbill in 1999, and it turns up on the Musical Theatre Wikipedia page as an unattributed proverb.
Unhelpfully for the Joker: Folie à Deux marketing department, then, it seems Gaga just described a musical – exactly the subject Warner Bros has been attempting to distance itself from. Musicals, as the bizarre phenomenon of song-less trailers shows, are bad business. Plenty of fun-averse folks will apparently see those three nasty syllables on a poster and spend their money elsewhere – when a certain demographic decide to blanket-avoid your product, hiding some of that product’s true nature might just be a smart move.
This does beg the question, though: if musicals are still considered advertising poison, why is Hollywood making so bloody many of them?
In the last 12 months, we’ve seen Wonka, The Color Purple, Wish and Mean Girls. In the next few, we’ve got Mufasa: The Lion King, Moana, Spellbound, Wicked and – sorry Gaga – Joker: Folie à Deux.
In plenty of ways, the musical format captures a lot of what – theoretically – brings people to cinemas. If people flock to the big screen for spectacle and stories of scale, having stars describe their emotions through song isn’t a bad way to do it on the (relatively) cheap. There’s something about the sheer emotional excess of a musical number that seems to suit cinema far more than, say, TV.
The chance to stretch some different performing muscles also seems to appeal to actors, so big musical adaptations are often hardly wanting for star power. Some of the biggest names on the planet – Timothee Chalamet, Zendaya, Gaga – have all taken a stab at the medium at one time or another (or will do soon). The cast for Jon M Chu’s upcoming Wicked is a who’s who of Hollywood’s biggest “actors’ actors”.
It also helps that plenty of the biggest musical adaptations are based on phenomenally successful IP. Something like The Color Purple has all the prestige that comes from a big, worthy, awards-friendly story alongside the name recognition of both Spielberg’s original film and the Broadway smash hit it inspired.
Still, the notable post-Covid uptick in musical films getting greenlit feels odd. Marketing teams are still convinced that the way to give them their best chance in the court of public opinion is to hide their light under a bushel, which is difficult when every other week rumours emerge that an upcoming sequel to a major blockbuster is putting on its dancing shoes.
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In fairness, there’s also not much evidence that musicals are making a financial splash. For every Wonka and Mean Girls, we have West Side Story, The Color Purple and Wish. The hit rate on musical movies doesn’t seem far devolved from that of films where the score remains very much in the background.
In 2024, then, the movie musical seems stuck between two worlds. Hollywood seems convinced that showtunes are the key to getting folks back in cinemas, but is terrified that anyone will realise a film has a dance number in it. Since folk history decided the movie musical was killed by the American New Wave in the late 1960s, it feels like the medium has an image problem it’s been struggling to shift ever since.
I’m just not convinced the industry’s current attitude helps anybody. If you’re going to the effort to make a movie musical, why not make a song and dance out of it, you know?
