Are we seeing the death of auteur cinema?

To nobody’s very great surprise, the much-anticipated, very expensive Joker sequel, the pretentiously entitled Folie à Deux, has flopped, and then some. The original film opened to a staggering $96 million on its opening weekend in 2019, and went on to earn more than a billion dollars worldwide, eventually winning an Oscar for its lead Joaquin Phoenix. It was that rare movie that appealed as much to cineastes and critics as it did to the Saturday-night popcorn crowd. Never mind that its director Todd Phillips ripped off Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy and Taxi Driver so much that it was virtually actionable; it was heralded as a vital, incendiary piece of cinema.

Its sequel has not been. It has been met with angry, vocal contempt from audiences, disappointed and displeased both by its status as a musical (but not a proper one) and the fact that it’s almost entirely devoid of action, both in the blow-things-up sense and in the definition of anything actually happening. It is the exemplar of a film made by an out-of-control, over-indulged filmmaker, on far too high a budget (around $200 million, of which as much as $50 million was allotted for Phillips, Phoenix and his co-star Lady Gaga) and with no particular interest in entertaining or pleasing his audience. It is flopping hard and painfully; it’s likely it will earn about a quarter of its predecessor’s gross. There will not be a Joker 3.

It is the second high-profile director-driven misfire in as many weeks. The other, Megalopolis, has failed even harder at the box office. It was made (inexplicably) for a giant budget of $120 million, and will not make even a tenth of that at the US box office. Its director Francis Ford Coppola invested his own money into the movie when studios balked at its strange mixture of experimentalism and low-stakes family drama; he will lose pretty much every penny, which is a sad end to a career that has seen impossible success and dismal failure rub up against one another. At the last, failure won out.

Coppola and Phillips may have little in common as filmmakers — the former is nothing if not a visionary, whereas there is a certain irony in the latter having obtained his greatest success treading on another’s coattails — but at least they have made distinctive, challenging pieces of cinema that are a million miles more individualistic than, say, Deadpool & Wolverine. Yet unfortunately the fact that both have failed so completely financially and, many would suggest, artistically as well, and have therefore entered into the big black book of box-office flops, means that auteur-led cinema, already an endangered species, is now well and truly being read its last rites.

Over the weekend, I watched Hal Ashby’s peerless Being There. A black comedy about a blank slate being raised to fame and influence through a misunderstanding, it anticipates many of the themes of the Joker films, albeit with vastly more subtle and wittier execution. Yet for its undoubted brilliance, it is impossible to imagine a film as risky and adult-oriented being made by a studio these days, unless a major A-list star was attached, and even then, the chances of success are limited. Cinema today is a series of low-risk options, with originality and daring reduced to the lowest common denominator. The joke really is on anyone who wants anything more, it would seem.