What’s more, Phillips makes this assertion in the most self-indulgent, navel-gazing fashion. Most sequels either advance the story told by their predecessor, or retell that story with a few variations, but this one spends more than two hours reminiscing about that story instead. Whether Arthur’s past crimes are being discussed by his therapist and an interviewer in Arkham Asylum, or by lawyers and witnesses in Gotham city’s courtroom, scene after scene is devoted to people talking about what happened in a five-year-old film. These debates may have been interesting in a magazine article, a spin-off graphic novel, or a chat in the pub, but they’re not the stuff of a $200m blockbuster.
Yes, you read that correctly. Folie à Deux is reported by different outlets to have cost between $190m (£145m) and $200m (£153m), an almost unbelievable leap up from the first film’s $65m budget. And that’s the real reason why its opening weekend is so calamitous. If it had cost as much as Joker, or even twice as much, its box-office takings might not have looked so paltry. But around three times as much? Folie à Deux is a folly.
Hollywood’s spiralling costs
Not that this is the craziest amount of money spent on a Hollywood film in recent times. Last year an article in the Daily Telegraph listed some of the astronomically expensive blockbusters that were coming out, including Fast X ($340m, £260m), Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny ($300m, £229m), Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One ($290m, £222m), and The Flash ($220m, £168m). Stack the marketing costs on top of those figures, and they all had to perform phenomenally well to break even; in the end, it is estimated that none of these films made significant profit, and Indiana Jones and The Flash made significant losses.
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But the article placed much of the blame for these films’ monumental costs on the visual effects, especially those visual effects that had to be finished at top speed to suit a studio’s set-in-stone release schedule. And, whatever you thought of them, each of those films looked like a bona fide blockbuster. In terms of the star-studded casts, the global locations, the elaborate stunts, and, yes, the visual effects, they were all so spectacular that “you could see the money on the screen”, as the expression goes. That’s not the case with Phillips’ dingy, small-scale courtroom drama. Indeed, there aren’t many other Hollywood films in which the money is so shockingly not on the screen.
