Todd Phillips Doesn’t Want Movie Theaters to Show ‘Commercials’ Before Films: They ‘Take the Air Out of the Room’

Todd Phillips has a punchline for how theaters can combat the rise of streaming: take out the pre-movie ads.

The “Joker: Folie à Deux” director told Empire magazine that “commercials” have become detrimental to the cinema-going experience. Instead, movie theaters should forego ads all together, Phillips said.

“Stop showing commercials before the movies. We’ve paid for our tickets. We’re excited to be there,” Phillips said. “The commercials tend to take the air out of the room.”

Presumably, Phillips is referring to actual commercials, and not the pre-feature trailers for other films.

In the case of “Joker: Folie à Deux,” other components seemed to be what drove audiences out of the room. Fellow filmmaker Paul Schrader said he couldn’t get through more than 25 minutes of the critically panned sequel.

Quentin Tarantino liked it though — or at least he liked it for what it is. Tarantino believes that “Folie à Deux” was a “fuck you to the movie audience.”

“The Joker directed the movie. The entire concept, even him spending the studio’s money — he’s spending it like the Joker would spend it, all right? And then his big surprise gift — haha! — the jack in the box, when he offers you his hand for a handshake, and you get a buzzer with 10,000 volts shooting you — is the comic book geeks. He’s saying fuck you to all of them,” Tarantino said during the “Bret Easton Ellis” podcast. “He’s saying fuck you to the movie audience. He’s saying fuck you to Hollywood. He’s saying fuck you to anybody who owns any stock at DC and Warner Brothers […] And Todd Phillips is the Joker. Un film de Joker, all right, is what it is. He is the Joker.”

Tarantino is much more into “Joker 2” than Denis Villeneuve’s “Dune 2” — or even his “Dune 1,” for that matter. On the same podcast, Tarantino said David Lynch’s “Dune” was enough for him.

“I don’t need to see that story again,” he said. The same goes for TV remakes.

“It’s one after another of this remake and that remake,” Tarantino said. “People ask, ‘Have you seen “Dune”? Have you seen “Ripley”? Have you seen “Shōgun”?’ And I’m like, ‘No, no, no, no.’”