When you hate your own fans

Todd Phillips, the Oscar-nominated director of Road Trip, does not seem like a very fun guy. Or at least, he hasn’t been interested in having any fun since approximately 2016.

Phillips began his career as a contemporary to Judd Apatow who was very much in the same wheelhouse, writing and directing very successful bro-dude comedy films like Old School, Starsky & Hutch, and his cash cow, The Hangover franchise. He was also meant to be the director of Borat, but he left the film during production.

After wrapping up The Hangover III in 2013, completing the meanspirited and foulmouthed trilogy that helped launch Bradley Cooper, Zach Galifianakis and Ed Helms to stardom, he shifted away from outright comedy with War Dogs in 2016, based on the insane story of two burnouts from Miami who decided to become government arms dealers. I personally really like War Dogs and it’s probably the Phillips project I like best, but both critics and audiences were lukewarm on it.

Regardless, Phillips was a proven commodity with a hit franchise in his pocket, so studios were naturally interested in doing business with him. That’s when he hit upon his cunning plan to get someone to fund the movie he’d always wanted to make: a painstaking homage to his favorite Martin Scorsese New York films, The King of Comedy and Taxi Driver. He phoned Joaquin Phoenix to gauge his interest in being in on the con, which was to pitch said film in the guise of a superhero film. If he could trick Warner Brothers into giving him the reins of a standalone Joker film, he could basically recreate The King of Comedy, and together he and Phoenix would Trojan horse the Clown Prince of Crime into a Scorsese pastiche — or perhaps vice versa.

The end result of the two men laughing all the way to the bank was 2019’s Joker, which grossed over a billion dollars worldwide, won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, and was nominated for seven Academy Awards, winning Best Score and garnering Phoenix his Best Actor Oscar. The end result was also an absurd, spectacularly joyless and dour movie that was an avatar for people who think they’re smarter than everyone else in the room — I’m speaking both about the people making the movie and the movie’s fans here.

Following the runaway success of Joker, Phillips has said a lot of Rich White Guy stuff, like that he doesn’t make comedy films anymore citing the You Can’t Even Do Comedy Nowadays Because Of Woke precedent, and crowing loudly about how unions ruin everything following the WGA, DGA and SAG strikes. It’s clear that Phillips thinks very little about studios and about the people who work hard to help him make his movies, but most of all, he really does not care for the people who have, for nearly 25 years, paid to go see them.

More words follow this for paid subscribers, including No. 6 on our Coen Brothers Community Countdown!