The Rest Is Entertainment - Boris Johnson's Cash Dash

Episode Date: October 7, 2024

'Unleashed' is the forthcoming memoir of former Prime Minister Boris Johnson. There is much anticipation about tales from his childhood through to his time as PM and facing death during Covid. But how much of the real Boris do we get or is this book just a chance to line his pockets as many expect? Hollywood has another big flop on it's hands as Joker: Folie a Deux limped to an underwhelming box office return. The first film was an unexpected success, why has it's follow up bombed? Naomi Campbell has been in the news not due to the catwalk, but due to admitting failures at her fashion charity. What are the pros and cons of celebrities using their clout for charitable causes? Recommendations: Marina: Katherine Grace Thomas - Nina Simone in Liberia (read) Newsletter: www.therestisentertainment.com Twitter: @‌restisents Instagram: @‌restisentertainment YouTube: @‌therestisentertainment Email: [e-mail] Producer: Neil Fearn Executive Producers: Tony Pastor + Jack Davenport As always we appreciate your feedback on The Rest Is Entertainment to help make the podcast better: https://forms.gle/hsG8XXMc4QyGNBHN8 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What does possible sound like for your business? It's having the spend to power your scale with no preset spending limit. Redefine possible with Business Platinum. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Terms and conditions apply. Visit mx.ca.com. Hello and welcome to this episode of The Rest Is Entertainment with me Marina Hyde. And me Richard Osmond. What a busy week you've had Marina, you've been in LA and I don't mean Little Hampton. I mean Los Angeles. I went to LA for a period of around 60 hours,

which in some ways flatters the city, I feel. Saw all the sights. I saw all the sights. I always think when I go there that the aesthetic is like a recapture. You're always feeling that any vista you're looking at could easily divided by a white grid and you just have to click on the traffic lights. That I would say is the aesthetic. Anyway, I went for the premiere of the show that I

write on, the franchise, which is coming out on HBO. You can watch it on Sky or Now TV. And the premiere was at Paramount Pictures at the lot, the only lot that's still in Hollywood. It's so historic and so beautiful. It was one of those kind of perfect evenings, you know, great weather and all the kind of really old palm trees. And the lot itself, which I'd never been to before, is absolutely incredible. And it's sort of interesting because Paramount's being sold at the moment and you almost feel like, is this lot there, this piece of real estate, their biggest asset? Because it is absolutely huge and stunning and old.

It's no the Maidstone Studios though. But at some point when the show is coming out, I want to do an absolute nose to tail how a big show like that gets made, what happens, all that kind of stuff. Well, I would love to do that. And we'll do that fairly shortly because it's also got a premiere at the London Film Festival over this side of the Atlantic this coming weekend. So after that we'll get into it. But today we are talking about a guy, I think fans of the rest of politics would have heard of this guy, Boris Johnson. And he has got a book out and we're going to be talking about that.

Don't worry, we're not going to be looking into the politics. We are looking into the economics and the entertainment and how much money he's going to make, for which I have good news and bad news. So we're talking about Boris Johnson's book, we're talking about... We're talking about Naomi Campbell's charity. She's been disqualified as a charity trustee for five years because of sort of financial mismanagement at her charity. And we're also going to talk about Joker, Folly Adun. Now this was a huge movie, the first one when it came out in 2019 and the sequel

to it, which stars Lady Gaga and is a musical has just really tanked. And we're going to talk about why and maybe what it tells us about sort of current trends and things happening in Hollywood. Talking of really tanking though, let's start with Boris Johnson. So the book is out this week. It's called Unleashed, which sounds like a very poorly rated GB news show, but is actually the title.

But it's also the sort of thing that Jamie Lange would call his autobiography. Jamie Lange from Made in Chelsea. Finally. Obviously, he's got a big sort of promotional strategy to promote the book and we'll talk about quite what that entails. But it's been sort of funny because two of the big things for that have been beset by problems which is Laura Coonspoker was going to do a big interview for the BBC, had to pull out because she accidentally WhatsApped him the sort of briefing notes for her interview and then Beth Rigby was going to interview him at Cheltenham where I just interviewed you Richard yesterday which was great fun. Also nice to meet lots of fans of the podcast. Oh yeah there were so many it was amazing. Well Beth Rigby from Sky was going to interview him but apparently there

was some dispute that she couldn't make a transcript of it or record it and therefore she has also pulled out Calling Your Book Unleashed which is you know, you know, I'm wild me, I'm unchained, but no, how wet are you? You can't make a transcript of me at Cheltenham. I mean, buck up. I mean, I quite enjoy the novelty because you don't hear the phrase Boris Johnson and putting out the same sentence very often, which I, so that bit's quite enjoyable. But tell me, how do you think this book is going to go, Richard? Richard Pettigrew I mean, that's the big question. I had good news and bad news. The bad news is this is going to go pretty well I would say. It's not going to be a Liz Truss. It's going to sell a lot of copies. I think the good news is it's not going to sell as many copies as the publishers think

it's going to or as Boris Johnson thinks it's going to. I don't imagine Boris Johnson really cares how many it's going to sell because he's already got his advance. Just to go through the numbers, so his advance, it was reported his advance was half a million, but again, more bad news. That is just a quarter of his advance. So that's the first quarter you get paid on signature of a contract. So he would have got half a million when he delivered it,

which presumably is about three or four weeks ago. He will get another half a million this Thursday when it's released. I have a lot to think about that when you're walking past waterstones. And he'll get another half a million when the paperback comes out which is probably I would think March, April or something like that. So the advance would be about two million I would think. And how would it sell? I mean political biographies are interesting so Blair's one is sort of

held up as the exemplar of great selling autobiographies of British prime ministers. He's sold 92,000 copies in its first week. Now, when Thatcher's came out, it was just before the Nielsen ratings. It's pre-Nielsen, yeah. Yes, but they reckon about 120,000. So Blair 90, Thatcher 120, those are which are both, by the way,

huge numbers in books. I mean, really, really big numbers. And I would have thought, I would be surprised if he wasn't nestled somewhere around there. It'll set a lot of copies. But I've been talking to an awful lot of people in the publishing industry and there are voices at Harper Collins, which is his publisher, which is part of News Corp, who think it's going to set as well as the Prince Harry book.

And I will- The fastest selling memoir of all time. The fastest selling memoir of all time, which sold over 400,000 copies in its first week. Listen, I've made a lot of predictions on this podcast. 94% of them have been absolutely incorrect, but I'm very comfortable in saying, I don't think it's going to sell as many as the Prince Harry autobiography would be my view. I think it'll sell well.

I don't think it's going to sell crazily well. Now that's a, that advance of 2 million. Um, if you're worried about him making royalties, I don't think he's ever going to earn out that advance. I think it'll sell okay, you know, but he would have to sell maybe 600,000 hard backs and the same again in paperback to earn that back, which I don't think he will. He sold 600,000 books in total in his career, which is obviously not at all bad.

The biggest selling one of which was that Churchill book, which we'll come to in a minute. So yeah, I don't think he's ever going to win out. So I think that 2 million is all he's going to get. And of course you take off 300,000 of that for his agent's fees. Imagine being Boris Johnson's agent. Oh my God, can you imagine? I mean, at least they're getting 300 grand, but I don't know if it's worth it putting up with that. One assumes he's going to pay his tax on it as well. So it'll come down. I know Blair's autobiography, all the profits went to charity.

I'm not sure that that's what's happening, given the size of Boris Johnson's family. He's got people to pay for. There's a weird thing about it. One thing I noticed, which is that they're doing something slightly sort of, it's almost like the IMAX version of it. There's a limited edition premium version which is signed deluxe cloth bound in a slipcar. I haven't seen this before. Well, do you know where that comes from? Where? The place you get that is in fantasy novels, which is very apt if you look at some of the stuff that's in there. Yeah, so fantasy novels are very big on doing like a cloth bound, incredibly limited edition signed thing, you know, sort of one of 200

and you... With an illuminated map of the land at the start. Exactly that. So let's see Boris Johnson's illuminated map of Britain. See where it stops, I'm guessing somewhere around North London. So the other thing about his advance, as far as I can tell, that's a worldwide advance because no one's really gonna buy this in America and Australia. So that money will be for the whole of the world. So he's not getting extra money from Lithuania

like normal authors might do. So listen, I'm trying as much as I can to make two million sound as little as possible, but that is what he's getting and it's a huge amount of money. Other people's autobiography. So Thatcher, 120, let's say Blair 92, Cameron first week sales 21,000, Gordon Brown first week sales 9,000, John Major first week sales

five and a half thousand, Theresa May three and a half thousand, and who's this at the bottom of the list? 2,200 sales list trusts. There you go. See the bottom of that list. But Boris, I suspect he'll sell over over a hundred thousand but the other publishers I think want him to sell They like like enough to make that money back and also usually you would here's an interesting thing I'd love your take on this normally with Harper Collins They'll give you a two million pound advance because they will do a deal with one of their newspapers the news call Yeah, which will amortize that cost so they will do a deal with one of their newspapers, the News Corp, which will amortise that cost. So they will say, you know, essentially we can do the exclusive extracts from this and that is worth an awful lot of money. So that goes into the advance.

But in this case, the, the, the, the extracts have been in the Daily Mail. What on earth happened there? Why didn't they nail it down for 2 million? I'm amazed. He must have, they must have felt he was at the peak of his negotiating powers. I'm, I think that is again, it's, it's, it's good work on behalf of the agent, but it's not on behalf of the people who negotiated that deal at all. My assumption is I could be wrong about this. So his salary at the mail is a million, which he's definitely not earning. The columns are fairly irregular and they're not very good. And this is just absolute bogstab.

Well, they don't have any purchase on, you know, they're not what people are talking about. Yeah, literally no one's paying any attention. But I'm guessing that that million pound was pre-baked in, they got the rights. That they'll get the serialization rights, I would have thought. That makes more sense of that money because it's, I mean, that's an insane amount to pay someone who some people like but most people are not that interested in anymore, it's sort of yesterday's news. Now lots of journalists have done diligent work on all of our behalves and read all 700 pages.

But you know what you had to do. You could see it, but you had to go into a room and read it in a sort of closed environment. And you came out pregnant. And you came out, what just happened? Yeah, when he announced it, he said, stand by for my thoughts on Britain's future to explode over the publishing world

like a much shaken bottle of champagne. I'm so glad you never talked like that, even though you'll sell shit on his and always will. Sorry, yes, I tell you what we did hear that perhaps there are still tickets available at time of recording for his appearance in Chatham in that big tent that you sold out. And Manchester as well. And that I've sold out before. I know for someone who's about to sell as many as Prince Harry. Also I'm hearing his event in Liverpool might be being rescheduled. You think?

For the 12th of November. He's done what is quite a conventional sort of strategy for a type of book like this, which is that he's got lots of little news lines that he's trying to parcel out. He did an interview with Tom Bradby, one of the people who hasn't pulled out of an interview with this, which is that he's got lots of little news lines that he's trying to parcel out. Tom Bradby, one of the people who hasn't pulled out of an interview with him, that was where he said, I regret apologizing for Partygate. And he was asked, do you regret apologizing to the Queen? I don't discuss my conversations with the Queen. Sorry, what? What is this hanky-clutching? You have revealed that she had bone cancer. You discuss anything. I mean, I'm a trustworthy man.

Wow. Yeah. So the whole book though is that that sort of the people who have sat through it, it is one, this is not one for the personal growth section of the bookshop. Yeah. If you like the tone, then maybe you can do 700 pages of it. Yeah. But I mean, this is in one of the published excerpts, which I think is really interesting when he's talking about nearly dying from COVID.

It wasn't just the physical distress, it was the guilt. It was the political embarrassment of it all. I needed to be be oying back on my feet, like an India rubber ball. I needed to be out there leading the country from the front, sorting the PPE, fixing the care homes, driving the quest for a cure.

I mean, is that your reflection on a near time experience? This is the trouble. What we want in a political memoir is the behind the scenes, you know, what people, the emotions, I suppose, in lots of ways that people, because we know what the front of house was doing. And I suppose you want the emotion, but as we say, you know, emotions is phantom limb. It doesn't seem to twitch at all in this book. Well, that's the fascinating thing, isn't it? In anyone else's autobiography, that's a hugely meaningful thing.

He nearly died, he's got a young family. So you think, well, that's the moment where you say, here's the real me, here's the real human being. But I don't think he's able to look himself in the mirror like that. I don't think he has a true image of himself where he can go there. I don't think he has the will to go to,

to say, this is the real me, or this is how I felt about this, this is the emotion of it, this is how I felt about other people dying because this is what I went through. And extraordinary to be able to write that. And he might go, yeah, listen, I'm being brave and there's more important people, but it's not, it's an autobiography. It's an incredibly important moment in somebody's life. And also if I'm going to read 700 pages I can do five pages on how Mortality feels and what he felt about what he'd achieved in life and all of those things and it seems a strange thing to what doesn't seem a strange thing for him to leave out because he's always left out that core of who Actually are you to do 700 pages without telling people you actually are well that tells people you are I suppose

Yeah are you. To do 700 pages without telling people who you actually are, well that tells people who you are I suppose. Yeah, I mean the thing that was so great about that series that I banged on about, the corridors of power should America police the world, was seeing those decision makers. You know, you knew the news stories and many of them were about things and genocides that had happened decades before, but the rawness with which they were in the present day talking about what they were feeling, what was going on behind those closed doors, is so compelling. I mean, I think actually even if he were to have that character arc which he still wants because it's the only place he makes sense to him, you know, if we think of

him as a fictional person, which essentially he is a fiction, his own creation, he needs, this is the point where it goes wrong and then you have your third act redemption. If we accept his premise that he's in only act two, and he's about to get our sort of hot Top Gun style redemption in act three, then you need to have a low point and we need to see this but it's not. Yeah, you need to have an act that's just entirely Robert Jenrick. Yeah.

And then he returns on a motorbike with like a gunship helicopter above him, sunglasses on, four more kids riding pillion. Yeah. Yes. I felt that he was... But in a funny kind of way, all these people pulling out of doing those interviews, and I know it's not the formal reason, but there is something so sort of washed up about all these women finding something slightly better to do with their time. You know, this is the post-prime ministerial life and it is an exquisite form of agony for a person who only makes sense to himself in that job for which he sacrificed everything and everyone. Well, that's it. So Boris Johnson had a career

in politics, right? And it's very easy for someone like Boris Johnson to get to the top in politics, but I think we'll get to the top in politics. But I think we'll get to the point where suddenly he becomes an entertainment figure as well. And he will find the competition there a great deal harder. And by the way, he can absolutely hold his own. We've said it before, he can write, he can turn a phrase. You know, he's got shtick,

which is what you really need entertainment like. He's got a thing. He's got like Johnny Vegas has got shtick. Boris has got, right? We know the thing that That he does and you know He's making his money now in the book and he will start making money on on other TV shows and and and things like that But it's definitively he's not in the world of politics anymore

The Laura kunz kundberg stuff and I'm sure on rest is politics They talked forever about that, you know sending the briefing notes and what that means and why that means might mean interviews compromised. But the fact that that was scheduled at all is a disgrace. I mean, is a disgrace that is literally a half hour advert for a book, a commercial book funded by the BBC. That is worth... I was thrilled that, I don't know why people were complaining about it, you know, the notes being sent He's lost out on half an hour of primetime promotion. Yeah, I couldn't be happier. No, that's what I thought I thought genuinely his publicist will be so, I mean gutted beyond words. That's the absolute dream That's like I mean, I was not quite him being on Graham Norton

But it's a pretty close second. His best-selling book which I think is all 270,000 copies Which is The Churchill Factor. By the way listeners, if you haven't read this review ever, please but it's a pretty close second. His best-selling book, which I think is all 270,000 copies, which is The Churchill Factor. By the way, listeners, if you haven't read this review ever, please go to the New Statesman website and read Sir Richard Evans's, who's a Cambridge historian, review of his book about Churchill,

which is one of the biggest drive-bys I've ever read. It's absolutely hilarious. I can't really pick favorite lines, but the end of this paragraph, which has just gone through various factors and actually says, just ends with this line saying, the Germans did not capture Stalingrad, though this book claims they did. You've written a book basically about the Second World War and you don't know the results of Stalingrad. I'm so sorry. It's just one of those, it's like being a football correspondent and thinking that, like, by like Bayern Munich won the Champions League final in 1999.

You sort of have to know it, but there are limits to these, so it is probably there are things that he needs to be pulled up on by journalists. Well look, he's a grifter and I genuinely, I don't say that with any edge, plenty of people who are very charming grifters and who do it in a harmless way and make a very good living. But you know, he is a grifter who has an awful lot of impact on everyone's life. But he was a grifter as a columnist, he's a grifter as a prime minister, grifter as an author. I mean, that's his shtick.

And as I say, listen, it's so fine to be a grifter. We all do it from time to time. We will look back and go, wow. And through a strange confluence of events, that's who we had as our Prime Minister at a time of enormous crisis, genuinely enormous crisis and a time of enormous opportunity as well, both of which he didn't really make the most of. But it is nice I think maybe to start this next act where he is no longer a frontline politician but can instead just indulge his personality and then see how much the public can get behind that and enjoy that and he can monetize that in any way he wishes without having to bother the rest of us.

Yes, tickets still available for those events. So we'll just keep an eye on those sales and we will obviously keep an eye on the book sales when they come out. We'll have another little chat about those as a follow up. It'll probably be two weeks time. We might get some early ones for next week's podcast. I'd be very interested to see. As I say, it will do really, really well. It's not if anyone's looking for it to being in remainder spins, if anyone's doing tweets saying, Oh, look, it's half price. You think, yeah, that's because these things are heavily discounted. So that shops get market share of these things. It's going to be a successful book, but I suspect he's made every penny he's ever going to make

out of it already. Yes. Shall we go to some adverts? Let's do what if one of them's for Boris's book? Oh, we're gonna we're gonna look fools I they wouldn't advertise with us I don't think well I'm quite happy to be paid by him by default welcome back everybody now I'm we're gonna talk about the Joker but you just were no I just the the the follow-up to talk about The Joker, but you just were. No, I jest.

The follow up to the Joker movie, Joker Folie Adeur came out last week. Yes. So we know the box office numbers now and it's opening weekend. It grossed $40 million in the US. Now you might think, oh, that sounds quite a lot of money. I'd take 40 million. I would not sniff at it, but this is a 200 million dollar budget. This is a terrible result for this movie. They will have spent almost the same on marketing all over again, as we've often talked about in this podcast, so we won't dwell too long about that.

But I think it tells us a lot of really interesting things about Hollywood. Yeah. First of all, this is a really sort of big swing. The first one was a big swing, by the way. It was, you know, it's directed by Tom Phillips, who despite having once directed The Hangover, he wanted to do it as this dark and gritty kind of New York style, Gorsasian movie,

almost like Taxi Driver. The star is a villain. But that movie, it was an affordable swing. That movie cost $55 million, right? And was a huge hit. It was a huge hit, made more than a billion. Joaquin Phoenix won the best actor for basically playing a sort of DC character, which is sort of amazing. And in a way, like, why are they doing a sequel? Because it's the franchise movie era, so of course they're doing a sequel.

And it comes five years later. Now, Star Salaries and Todd Phillips' salaries alone cost the budget of the first film. Really? This is the problem. Star salaries are dining out on a different time still. But if you just made a billion dollars from the first movie and it was yours, is that not the time for you to cash in? Okay, but think about it. Another thing that is so fascinating is that, you know, that old dictum about Hollywood that everyone says always, which is nobody knows anything. Oh, these movies that come out and in retrospect, it seems so obvious

what was wrong with them. Okay, so here is a movie that was by far and away seen mostly by men. And I don't want to say that like a big portion of that was a kind of in style adjacent aspect of the Phantom, but yeah, maybe. So you're going to do the sequel is going to be a musical, is it right? Starring So you're gonna do, the sequel is going to be a musical, is it right? Starring Lady Gaga. I mean, I don't want to say how did this happen, but anyway. And then they pay huge amounts of money to the stars and the director. That's like a quarter of the budget. They've had to get venture capital money to make even make that up, okay. In an era where the IP, as

we keep saying, is a bigger star than most stars, but stars still want all these salaries and they're getting them. It is a musical. I just got to say it. It is a musical. Joke of the musical. Joke of the musical. And once again, we see that they can't really market musicals as musicals because it's limiting.

And we've seen this, you know, that's even the case with The Mean Girls, the musical, which was like not Mean Girls, so it must be something different. The difference is it's a musical. But they still keep marketing these movies, not as musicals, because they think it's limiting in terms of how many people go and see it, right? How they chose to sort of announce it to the world. They put it on at the Venice Film Festival. Again, these are sort of things that increasingly start to feel from another time before the cold winds were blowing, right? So they put it on at the Venice Film Festival. Again, these are sort of things that increasingly start to feel from another time before the cold winds were blowing, right? So they stick it on at the Venice Film Festival, it gets really quite bad reviews, which are then sort of sitting there online for a month. And, you know, we talked about this in our Rotten Tomatoes betting thing, when

we're like, oh, that's not looking great on the, you know, the tracking for what people were going to give it a Rotten Tomatoes score. By the way, you've got a 10 minute standing ovation at Venice. Yeah, I think it got a 12 minute. I mean, by the way, the standing ovations at film festivals are complete bullshit. I don't know how anyone can bother being part of one. It's like party conferences, isn't it? When the leader speaks. But they're like one or two minutes. This is 12 minutes. I mean, you know, you're in the south of France. Do you want to go and have some fun? But also you just sat through a two and a half hour movie you didn't enjoy.

Yeah. You know, go to the Lou. The amount of people who must need a wee when they're doing those 12 minute standing ovations. It must be the energy surely in the room. And also the queue afterwards. I would, I can't cause I'm tall. You would see me if I slipped out, but surely that's the time to go for a wee. You've got to crawl out. I would have to crawl out. Osman's crawling the time to go for a wee. You've got to crawl out. Osmond's crawling out of Canfield. I am so sorry. I just need to go to the loo. I will be applauding in the toilet. I promise you. But let's then talk about the actual content of the film. Apart from the fact that it's a musical and it's starring Lady Gaga and it's an audience,, it's a starry of men. Okay. I don't know. Of course they have to make a sequel, but normally what you do in a superhero movie when you want to have

a sequel is you pit the hero against a new, perhaps bigger villain and you're going all the way to the big bad in the final kind of arc of maybe it's a trilogy or whatever it is. But he is the villain. So, you know, it did so well that first movie and it was a mood and it was a whole thing and it was a sort of, you know, interesting, but it doesn't really go anywhere all over again. Lady Gaga, right, I think she's, we don't have what her customary lunacy on the press tour, which we've enjoyed, we talked about this before when we talked about press tours once.

But you know, when she was doing House of Gucci, when she said that she'd hired a psychiatric nurse to be with her all the time, she never broke character for 18 months. She wrote a biography of the character. She came to believe the whole of Rome was a set. She believes she herself to have been cursed by large swarms of flies by the real life Gucci wife while she was filming. I mean, you know, that's just that was that. Yeah, she is if you're a publicist, she is useful. Yeah. She is. Well, is she though? we've had a couple of fun red carpet looks this time and nothing, is it that she smells something unfortunate on the wind and

therefore thinks, yeah, I'm perhaps not going to leave it all out there on the stage for my press tour this time. So that was quite helpful for even for both of those movies. Did you know, did she sort of scented and underperforming outing and not done it. I think it says a lot this about sort of franchise movie making and superhero franchise films, which obviously I've spent a long time thinking about. It's an R rated superhero movie. Deadpool and Wolverine is also an R rated superhero movie, which they didn't think you could do, but I can

feel it's one best actor for one. And Deadpool and Wolverine, it's really interesting. By the way, that movie is now neck and neck with where Barbie was at this time in its release, which considering it's R rated, it's had much less kind of grab on the discourse, I guess, cause Barbie's a family movie and it went across all sorts of things, but that movie has done extraordinarily well.

Franchise movies, the total US box office kind of needs to get to nine billion every year or else things start falling apart. By the way, they're all same. Me too. Likewise, but they are slightly falling apart. But franchise movies this year are going to account for about three billion of that and they will probably next year as well. So it is a huge chunk. You need them. You need them. And also they can't quite

think what to do other than them. That is a big problem. They've kind of hollowed out cinema in lots of ways. And when they're failing these movies like this one, they don't know quite what to replace them with. This movie should have stayed at that price, should have stayed around the 55 million mark and then it would have done really well. It doesn't have huge action sequences. So, so much of that money has gone on staff salaries. People are living in the past. It can't carry on anymore. Well, the same thing, exactly the same thing is happening in television.

You do shows now in TV and the fees are what they were five years ago. And you think, but the viewership is not what it was five years ago and the budget is not what it was five years ago. So what's been cut back here, the last thing to get cut is the people on screens money. And in TV, a lot of the time you'll see stuff and you go, that can't make any sense for anybody anymore. Cause I know what the underlying numbers are.

And so for this number to stay the same, it feels there was a corrective about 10 years ago, maybe 15 years ago, but there hasn't been another corrective now and so that money is still there. But I would say about the Joker, so we talk about franchise movies and superhero movies. The first Joker movie took the idea of a franchise movie, a superhero movie, and did something very, very interesting, unusual with it. Sort of did something very artistic with it, you know, took it into a different place. I know everyone does. This is my dark superhero movie.

Darker and grittier. Yeah, darker and grittier, but at least it was, you know, it was, it did something unusual. It was an enormous hit, like a huge hit. And people would have said to Todd Phillips before that came out and would have said to whoever commissioned it, you're crazy to do this. This is not going to make any money. Uh, so listen, we'll take a small punt on it, but you are not going to make money on this. And Todd Phillips would have said, trust me, this is going to make money.

I know what I'm doing. I know my audience is going to make money. So film comes out, makes billions and everyone goes, Oh, Todd told us, he said, you know what? We thought this was not gonna be commercial, but he spotted a new audience, a different audience we hadn't spotted. He made a movie for them, and it's made us a load of money. Well, speaking of the third right, this is what happened.

You know, once Hitler had done so well in France, this is what all the generals started saying. Maybe he's magic. Maybe we should invade Russia. And this is gonna make it- This is the German, yeah, sorry to bring it up to Hitler. No, this is gonna make it harder for me to do my next bit. So, so Todd Phillips, who just by the way, just to be clear for me is not Hitler. Yeah, I understand. Likewise, different opinions

are out there. So next time top flips comes in, and by the way, this took a while before making this, this sequel, and he comes in and says, you know, I'm going to make a sequel, but it's going to be like nothing you imagined It's gonna be completely different to what you think It's gonna be and it's gonna be a musical and I'm gonna have Lady Gaga in it and all of those executives again would have gone Oh, no, this is not gonna work at all. Todd is absolutely lost his mind. This is just crazy But then they'd have all gone they'd have like gone home and slept and go Oh, that's what I thought last time but Todd was was cleverer than me last time. And Todd had seen an audience I didn't know existed, had

understood this sensibility that I didn't understand, and made a billion dollars. So they would have gone, I mean, listen, here's our guy, let's do it again. So all I'm saying is- Don't give him 75 million. You've got something like substance, which has been an absolutely runaway hit. And the budget for that is 17 million. You know, it can be done, but you know, who knows what's going to be a hit. It genuinely is and listen I'm not sticking for you know Hollywood executives but it's quite hard. But if I'm Todd Phillips of course I'm going to make as much money out of that as I can. I've just delivered an enormous hit that everyone told me wasn't going

to be a hit right which is the dream of any creative ever. You know having the little show that could. That position you're not in very often in your career and you have to make, Hey, well, the sun shines. If I'm Todd Phillips, I go, I'm going to make another one, but it's really, really, really going to cost you. Cause this is my payday. He by the way, thinks he's going to make a great movie and I don't know why he would ask for less money. And if I was Warner brothers, I can absolutely understand why I would think we doubted this guy before. We doubted this alchemy that he's got, but now we trust him.

And it's one of those things I can absolutely see why every single decision along the line was taken. I see why Todd Phillips did everything he did. I see why Warner Brothers did everything they did. And then at the end of it, you go, oh, it's so obvious in retrospect, which is why nobody knows anything. Yeah. And all of this is just to say that, you know, people often say, well, people need to take risks or people need to back talent. And that's sort of exactly what they've done here. You know, they have taken a risk. They took a risk with the first Joker. They have backed talent. They backed Todd Phillips.

But as you say, somewhere in between those two things is the old Hollywood thing of let's pay enormously over the odds for something. Yeah they can't take a risk at this price point on this type of film anymore and there are certain movies that are coming you know also you know there's this whole other sort of plot line which is that James Gunn who directed the Guardians of the Galaxy it has been brought over to DC to reboot the entire DC universe which and you know they got their properties as Superman and Batman. But then there are these other movies which they call DC Elseworlds.

They're not sort of part of the DC Universe. DC Elseworlds sounds like a solicitor. I know, yeah, DC Elseworlds. Yeah, it's a sort of regional solicitor, but no. So even the Robert Pattinson Batman, that's not part of James Gunn's new DC universe. The Batman 2 that's coming is not part of the DC universe. The original Joker wasn't part of the DC universe and nor is this one. So there's all these kind of other projects that are sort of slightly not fitting in. So we don't really know until James Gunn starts unleashing his genius upon us.

But it's fascinating how much effort is going into all these universes and how much almost everybody and certainly most people listening, certainly me, doesn't care about them. Yeah, they're still fighting yesterday's war. These are yesterday's wars. He's taken the job at the absolute worst time. Yeah and there's some people who like them, love them and if you make a good one that's great but most people are just getting their entertainment on television because they think, well, they're making stories. They're making stories that I want to follow.

This cul-de-sac of, and by the way, I think the Marvel Cinematic Universe is one of the single greatest bits of content ever created in any medium. It's extraordinary, but I do. If you look at the glory years of that and what they did and how they sort of crossed things over and the amount of people they brought into the cinemas, it was extraordinary and amazing thing they did and amazing amount of money they made in the same way that Star Wars did.

But it can't be all of cinema. It's like they know that there's a massive problem in a crisis, but they haven't grasped so many of the different nettles yet, and they're going to have to because it just can't carry on. To sum up, Joker, Foddy had a 3 out of 5. And for all that, you know, we were talking that you could have got odds on it coming in below 60% on Rotten Tomatoes. That was definitely worth taking the best bet. It's currently on 31%.

Wow. And CinemaScore, which is one of the big statistical analysis of anyone who'd been to see the movie, is a D, which is, I mean, that's about as low as you could possibly get. I'm not sure it goes down to E, but that's a very, very, very bad score. Can we, as a palate cleanser, talk about Naomi Campbell? It's not a hugely cleansing story, but yes, I think we can. What's the opposite of a palate cleanser? A palate ruler. An emetic? Right, as an emetic, Naomi Campbell has a charity or had a charity called Fashion for Relief, which she founded in 2005 and it sort of staged fashion shows and did other sort of fashiony events in order to raise money for various relief efforts and for different

charities. Now, it was investigated by the Charity Commission, which is the Charities Watchdog, after reports were made by, I think, Save the Children and the Mayor's Fund for London saying that they'd never got the funds that they had been promised. Now, the investigation has resulted in a fairly devastating report, which they found complete chaos at it. There was evidence of financial misconduct at the charity. I mean, they'd raised something like five million or more at least, but only 389,000

had been given to partner charities. Now, tens of thousands have gone on luxury hotel rooms, private jets, £8,000 of spa treatments for Naomi in one visit to Cannes, cigarettes. Anyway, the list goes on. Hundreds of thousands of pounds of unauthorised consultancy payments to other trustees. They've been banned, she's been banned, Naomi Campbell has been banned the longest five years from being a charity trustee at all. What happens to the money? I mean, they can't call it back, presumably. It's very difficult.

It is what it is. No, it's really difficult. And this is one of the things that people may or may not have noticed. It does give charities a really terribly bad name. And there are a lot of people out there you see saying on social media, at all sorts of places, I don't give money to charities because they don't give it out. It's given on salaries. And, you know, I've got a lot of sympathy with paying the bosses of very big

charities a lot of money, because it's a very significant position. They're dealing with huge budgets and really kind of complex decisions about how to allocate aid. And I have, you know, people who are saying, you know, you should have the best people and they should be paid very well to do that. Yeah, you get an awful lot more money by having an amazing well-paid chief executive. That will make you an awful lot more money. As we see with Naomi Campbell and stuff like that, it is very, very, very hard to run a charity and it's not something for an amateur

just to do, just to rock up and try and do. This is such a mood, okay, this was founded in the noughties. Now this was the absolute high watermark of a particular type of celebrity culture. On the eve of the Palestinian elections in 2005, Richard Gere did a televised broadcast that said, Hi, I'm Richard Gere and I'm speaking for the entire world. It's like, no, but you're honestly not, like telling them to get out and vote, you know. There were pictures, I mean, remember seeing a billboard of Gwyneth Paltrow with some blue kind of war paint and a tribal necklace on saying, I am African. Now, I mean, this is the absolute, it's also the high watermark of getting it wrong.

Madonna had a fundraiser for her raising Malawi charity. She had it on the lawn of the UN, which allowed her to use it. It was in New York Fashion Week and it also got doubled as a promotion for the new Gucci store. And Tom Cruise said, I'm here because it's a fascinating cause and a great label. It was like the real sort of, oh my God, this is so disastrous. Mariah Carey was sending discarded furs to Mongolian yak herders. I remember Christie Brinkley saying, a model talking about a nuclear power plant is going to bring in a different audience to a nuclear scientist talking about nuclear power plants. That's true.

Yeah, but you know, I don't want to see a nuclear scientist in the Uptown Girl video. I don't want to see it. Yeah. There's maybe a reason. Essentially, it brings in an audience of people who don't care to see a nuclear scientist in the Uptown Girl video. I don't want to see it. I mean, you know, there's maybe a reason. Essentially it brings in an audience of people who don't care about nuclear power plants. And probably shouldn't be advising on them. Sorry, not to, you know, dismiss our modelling career or indeed the Uptown Girl video, which as I said, I'm a huge fan of. I mean, this was peak UN Goodwill ambassador when there was so... everyone was one. Jerry Halliwell was personally responsible for AIDS and maternal health care in sub-Saharan Africa.

Trying to solve it. Yes. Yeah. I mean, it's still a problem. I breaking everyone had to have humanitarian awards because you can't you know, Angelina Jolie has got so many of these awards and there are people who work day in day out trying to solve these really intractable problems and don't make kind of $15 million immediately in between, where's their award? But for celebrities to be involved in these things, you had to create this whole other structure, these galas, these other things. Celebrities giving money to charity is great. Running their own is another thing. Having said

that there is a huge obverse to this, which again, I have, I really struggle with this. We're also talking about Naomi Campbell, right? There was a, there was a time where she appeared at the Hague. Now I know who would have thought she would be the first Campbell at the Hague. I'm joking. Time's changed. Anyway, and she was called to appear before the war crimes trial of Charles Taylor who was a former Liberian president and he was on trial at the Hague and the trial had been running at the time since 2007 but in 2010 Mia Farrow put in some evidence to the court saying that she'd been at some dinner with Nelson Mandela and she'd seen Naomi be given a diamond with the

obvious implication that it was a blood diamond, which was part of how he, anyway. So Naomi Campbell was called to appear at Charles Taylor's trial at Hague. She went, she immediately announced that this is a big inconvenience to me. But, but you see, as she said, look, to be honest, I'd never really heard of Liberia. And Charles Taylor, the own defence lawyer said, many people hadn't until you turned up today. Okay, so everything about this is really sort of dark and wrong. But every single newspaper covered this piece of testimony. It was, you know, The Guardian, The Times, all live blogged it. It was carried live on Sky News, her testimony at the trial.

Normally 20 accredited journalists would attend this. There were hundreds trying to get in for this. I would say to you that for better or for worse, the news channels and the news organizations gave more time to this than I would guess than they had to the entire preceding years of the trial. And therein you see the sort of horrible flip side of it, which is that celebrities draw attention. Yeah.

Well, see, there's two different things. I understand why charities have spokespeople who are celebrities. I get that. I know lots of people who run charities and raising money is so incredibly difficult and having a celebrity, it's one arm of how you can do that. Lots of other arms, but it's when a celebrity themselves runs a charity. And there's lots of examples of when that has gone bad. But there are examples of celebrities who have set up foundations and

charities, you know, the charity navigator, which is a thing in the States that gives you four stars down to zero stars as to how one's charity is run. But Elton John is four stars, his foundation, and you won't hear a word said against that foundation. Michael J. Fox's Parkinson's Foundation as well, you know, makes a lot of money and spends it well. Jimmy Carter's Carter Center has got four stars.

Matt Damon and Waterade as well. So it's doable. But there is, you know, celebrities tend to get Messiah complexes or certain celebrities that tend to, and then they go, I can save the world's problem. I'm going to set up a charity. I'm going to do this. I'm not going to draw attention to a course. I'm going to be an operational part of solving it.

A hundred percent that. And that again is that thing. It's the Boris Johnson thing. They're just going, Oh no, I thought I can probably do that. Yeah, I will busk doing this charity and running a charities and as lots of people listen to this, we'll work for charities or run charities. It is insanely difficult to do just a constant day after day, having to earn the money, get the money in and then working out to the best place to resource it and working out your duty to care to so many people just that you know The issues of running a charity are

Immense it's almost the worst job possible for a celebrity because celebrities like to they get in a car they turn up somewhere They look at a camera They do what they're told and then they go home and that to them is a hard day's work and a charity is the exact opposite and so when a celebrity has their own charity, I just think due diligence is needed if you're contributing. But the one thing I wouldn't want is for people to see some of these things and think all charities are run like this. No, it's the worst. Because they are not. Charities are doing insanely incredible work and when someone comes along like this, and listen, maybe it may have been with the best intentions in the world and it just ran away with them. I absolutely get it. But it is not how most charities are run. I know, but it pulls down the

whole sector. This is rather a plain fact about Naomi Campbell, but I'm afraid she's not a very nice person. And you know, this is quite, it's a simple, it's a huge achievement. She's the first black model on the cover of French Vogue. I, you know, don't dispute any of that. And she's broken down lots of barriers. Having said that, at the peak of her fame, she was done for assault. She did a community service and she got paid to wear clothes for her community service. I don't think the maid who she assaulted got any of that. It's extraordinary how people will facilitate that type of personality setting up a charity when it is perfectly... Someone like Elton John, who is hugely intelligent is kind of

organisationally, you know, you can see all the things he's done all the way through from like Watford to his own foundation all the way through. Is it just a completely different kettle of fish to be a sort of dilettante and kind of breeze through and think that you can put your cigarettes on the bill is, is so depressing. And I mean, you know, I think five years is too little to be disqualified as a charity trustee, I have to say. I would also say an awful lot of celebrities give an awful lot of money to charity, it's the old smashy and icy thing and don't like to talk about it, but they genuinely don't.

I know a very, very big name comedian who right from the beginning of his career has given 10% of every single penny he's ever earned to, I mean, just immediately goes to single penny he's ever earned. I mean, it just immediately goes to charity and he's earned a lot of money. And lots and lots of other people do that. And lots of people have charitable foundations which don't have their names on them and they don't appear on television and tell you how great they are or sort of film videos of them doing kind of relief care or anything like that. So an awful lot of people are giving a lot of money to charity and If you are Elton or if you are Michael J Fox

It's absolutely if you think this is the thing I want to do and I'm going to do and commit completely It can be incredibly useful for those charities and JK Rowling with the Lumos Charity as well. There are examples of celebrities who get involved with charities and run them incredibly well And it's it's such a shame that you get some of these things where it just pulls the idea of charities. People want to believe that charities are not doing any good. People want to believe that charities are wasting money because then it absolves them of having the gift of charity. It absolves them of that.

And actually you spend any time with people running charities and almost all of them are breaking every bone they can to not spend an extra penny they don't need to and to get every single ounce of value out of every single penny that comes in. TS Eliot said most of the problems in this world are caused by people wanting to be important. And I would say that in this sector, most of the problems because as you say, as a whole, it's awful when things like this happen because people use this as an excuse, as you say, to withdraw from the whole idea of it. Can I have a recommendation that is based on this? Paul Maties One message to take home there,

if you're given a charity, keep giving the charity, they need it more now than ever. Emma Cunningham Absolutely. And can I, can my recommendation be a bit of an oldie but a goodie, and's slightly related to this. It's an essay which I don't think I recommend it for. It is absolutely amazing. It's for Gernika magazine. It was by someone called Katerina Grace Thomas. I will put this in the show notes. And it's about Nina Simone in Liberia. And if you want to be transported, it's one sort of long article. It's so extraordinary to the Monrovia of the 70s, which was this kind of futuristic place of kind of afro-glamour and decadence, this really progressive capital. And obviously the most terrible darkness falls in 1980, but it is so extraordinary. And it becomes this sort of dream of a place that she felt America could have been during the civil rights struggle.

And then she felt betrayed by it. They said that if you wanted to see what France was like, go to Côte d'Ivoire. If you wanted to see what the US was like, go to Monrovia. And it's this amazing city, and it's an extraordinary creation of the mood. By talking to people who knew Nina Simone during her time there, I can't recommend it enough to transport you to a place that without trying to sound like Charles Taylor's defence lawyer, you might not have known existed in that form because it was the sort of relative, you know, such a brief period before the darkness fell. But I can't recommend that enough. It's in Gernica magazine. Amazing. If I can also recommend an essay. No, I'm kidding. I think we'll do because

I think that sounds like an amazing recommendation. We covered a lot of ground, didn't we? We did. We really did. Thank you so much. Should we come back and do a Questions and Answers edition on Thursday? Let's do that. We shall see you all on Thursday. See you on Thursday.