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OPINION: Social Justice Warriors Slam ‘Joker’, Movie Smashes Box Office Numbers Anyway

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In: CULTURE

The much-anticipated movie Joker was finally released last Thursday in the United States. Many people, especially in the social media community were eagerly awaiting the highly advertised Batman spinoff, highlighting Joaquin Phoenix as the newest big-screen rendition of ‘The Joker’. Without giving away too much, The Joker (yes I have seen it) is a story (in my opinion) depicting a lonely white male, who is disaffected by the rapidly changing society we live in. He starts out a lonely but peaceful man but slowly adapts and reacts to his feelings that the world has apparently driven him to have.

Anyway, the movie was a smashing success, breaking an October record. According to Deadline.com:

Warner Bros/Village Roadshow/Bron Studios’ Joker wrapped its record October opening weekend at $96 million, above where the studio saw the pic Sunday.


Warner Bros had predicted a $93.5M Friday-Saturday-Sunday total yesterday, while the town thought north of $95M was a possibility. The studio revealed the final number Monday morning.
The success was worldwide for Joker, which squashed Venom‘s global opening record, as overseas raked in $140.5M from 73 offshore territories.


For director Todd Phillips, Joker reps a career opening record, besting the three-day domestic start of The Hangover 2 ($85.9M). It’s also an opening record for Joaquin Phoenix, far exceeding the $60.1M 2002 opening of Signs. And for Robert De Niro, even though he’s a supporting player in this, Joker reps his biggest domestic B.O. opening of all-time, ahead of Shark Tale ($47.6M).

Nevertheless, many leftists, social justice warriors, or just plain negative Nancys claimed the movie was a failure, horrible, should have been canceled, or talked about other movies people should go see instead for this reason or that. One might draw the conclusion that the purpose of the film was to go against some politically correct norms and seek to target a more unique audience base than many other movies currently in Hollywood. Whether it was or wasn’t the idea, the apparent objective was achieved just the same. This caused critics and social media pundits in their own right to take to their platforms and bash and trash (in addition to those who of course, love the film).

What’s most interesting here is the divergence between the consensus of the average ‘Joker’ movie attendee, and the people who fancy themselves, professional critics or journalists. The reader of this article can, of course, interpret this divergence however they will. Starting off, RottenTomatoes.com had some interesting ratings. When you go to RottenTomatoes.com to see the overall ratings, it shows a 70% ‘Tomatometer’ but a 90% ‘Audience Score’. That shows a big gap right there between the ‘critics’ and the fans.

SEE IMAGE BELOW:

RottenTomatoes.com screenshot

When you look closer it gets a little more interesting, showing a 70% rating on the ‘Tomatometer’ is just an average of the total from who they consider being ‘all critics’ and ‘top critics’. If you look at who gets to be a ‘top critic’, you can see the divergence gets even dicier, with only a 43% rating from the pinkies up crowd themselves.

SEE IMAGES BELOW:

RottenTomatoes.com screenshot
RottenTomatoes.com screenshot

Looking beyond the RottenTomatoes.com analysis, we have a few reports out. One is by the left-leaning website Vice.com. The title: “Apparently, After All That Drama, ‘Joker’ Is Terrible”. An excerpt from Vice.com reads:

To the dismay of everyone who’s been keeping up with Joker‘s twists and turns to date, it seems like that might not be the case. The movie was released nationwide today, and now critics’ reviews are in. Overall, they’re not looking great—in fact, some of them are downright brutal. As of this writing, the movie holds a 69% percent on Rotten Tomatoes, which is still “certified fresh,” but it isn’t as nice as one might have expected given the movie’s earlier buzz.

The author then goes on to cite all the good and bad reviews and it does lend credence to the fact that fans received the movie better than critics, but it still doesn’t make up for the very biased sounding title.

Next up you have a piece by ‘The Guardian’ telling you to not even bother to watch the movie at all. Trust us, they implied, we know better than you. The title of this article is: “Forget Joker: here’s the film you should see about an extremist loner”. The Guardian goes on to say in the subheading:

While Todd Phillips’ vacuous DC origins tale fails to go beneath its grimy surface, low-budget drama Cuck offers a braver alternative.

You can read the article yourself if you would actually like to learn more about the low budget movie ‘Cuck’ that they are pushing onto the unsuspecting reader. I won’t even get into the description of what that word means here.

Last but not least, (and certainly not comprehensive) you have the Daily Mail reporting on viewers who were so offended (or scared) by the movie’s storyline, they walked out before the movie was even over. Read more here about the article titled: “‘It’s way too terrifying’: Joker viewers around the world WALK OUT of movie theaters and urge cinemas to BAN the ultra-violent film saying it glamorizes gun crime and deals with mental health issues in a ‘triggering’ way”

Some further reactions (good or bad) on Twitter:

SEE TWEETS BELOW:

Joker actor Joaquin Phoenix surprised moviegoers by attending the screenings in LA. This was reported in a tweet by ‘Complex’.

Judging by the vast majority of tweets found under the hashtag #JokerMovie, most of the rank and file moviegoers loved it, with a few exceptions. I guess people really don’t care what the fancy wine and cheese designated opinion givers say that much anyway.

Ian MacDonald
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