181: Jokeropolis (with Jessica Ritchey)

Junk Filter

CW: this episode contains spoilers for Joker 2 and discussions of cinematic sexual violence.

The film writer Jessica Ritchey returns to the podcast to discuss the Reverse Barbenheimer of 2024: the more or less simultaneous release of two extremely expensive blockbusters, Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis and Todd Phillips’ Joker: Folie à Deux, two films that, as it turned out, nobody wanted to see.

The original Joker was a riff on Scorsese’s Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy, and the sequel drew inspiration from his earlier musical New York, New York as well as Coppola’s One from the Heart, but it was a shock to the studio and to fans of the first film when this unnecessary sequel turned out to be of little interest to general audiences (especially when word got out it was a musical, downplayed in the marketing) and was taken as a slap in the face by a significant section of the fanbase.

Megalopolis was not expected to be a hit but got a one-week theatrical release in the IMAX format and flabbergasted those few who saw it on that scale with its ludicrous plot, grandiose posturing and eye-popping visuals. But will this grand cinematic folly be reconsidered in the future as so many previous Coppola films have? We say yes.

We discuss all four of these films, offer a post-mortem on where it all went wrong for Joker 2, and profess our unexpected enthusiasm for Megalopolis and why we think it bizarrely succeeds where these other bloated vanity productions all fail.

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Trailer for New York, New York (Martin Scorsese, 1977)

Trailer for One from the Heart (Francis Ford Coppola, 1982)

First trailer for Joker: Folie à Deux (Todd Phillips, 2024)

First trailer for Megalopolis (Francis Ford Coppola, 2024)

Music video for “My Life”, Billy Joel, 1978