Over its opening weekend in theaters, Joker: Folie à Deux could not carry a tune. It earned a tragic $39 million at the box office, less than half of what 2019’s Joker grossed in its first three days out despite costing more than three times as much to produce. The lugubrious $190 million musical was a sad clown face on all fronts, cast into the dunk tank by critics and posting a D CinemaScore from audiences — the first comic-book title ever to earn such a low exit-poll grade.
Since premiering to a 12-minute standing ovation and a raft of mostly negative reviews at the Venice Film Festival last month, the Joaquin Phoenix–Lady Gaga two-hander’s fortunes have steadily worsened. Initially expected to pull in around $70 million over its multiplex bow, the sequel saw its projections repeatedly downgraded through the weekend. Even as late as Saturday, most rival studios had Joker 2 opening in the $45 million to $47 million range. That means people who bought tickets for Folie à Deux were advising people thinking of seeing it: Folie à Don’t.
Such box-office pie-in-the-face stands as a particular mess in contrast to the cultural spectacle surrounding director Todd Phillips’s first Joker. The $60 million drama claimed Venice’s top prize, the Golden Lion; took in $96.2 million in North America over its opening weekend; earned over $1 billion worldwide; and racked up 11 Academy Award nominations (including a Best Actor win for Phoenix’s turn as failed comedian named Arthur Fleck), in addition to becoming the highest-grossing R-rated movie of all time.
Worse, still, is the films’ bottom-line contrast. Skeptical of the first Joker’s commerciality as an R-rated character study in sociopathy (existing outside of Batman and the DC Extended Universe), its distributor, Warner Bros., offloaded around 50 percent of its production costs to Bron Studios and Village Roadshow — financial partners that, in turn, collected a commensurate percentage of the first Joker’s billion-dollar box office. Covetous of a bigger slice of the pie this time around, Warner Bros. bankrolled the second Joker by itself. And in an era of fiscal hardship and financial austerity for its corporate parent, Warner Bros. Discovery (which infamously canceled the $90 comic-book movie Batgirl in 2022 and wrote off its production costs as a tax loss in the service of what was at that time more than $42 billion in corporate debt), the studio will have to absorb all losses, including around $100 million in marketing costs.
Understood another way, Joker 2’s underwhelming arrival as the sequel to a prequel-reboot-spinoff speaks to Hollywood’s mounting reliance on IP concurrent with growing audience fatigue toward the offshoots of older movies (Men in Black: International and The Marvels, we are talking to you). Yet at a time when DC’s Batman prequel-reboot-spinoff series The Penguin is doing quite well both stream-wise and critically on Max, Joker 2’s failure to achieve box-office liftoff still inspires a certain disbelief. So how did things go so wrong for Folie à Deux?
It Violated the Rules of Sequelization
According to certain inalienable Hollywood rules, sequels live or die on a time-honored calculus. The second installment of an intended franchise can (and most often will) cost more than the first; but they shouldn’t cost too much more. And while not guaranteed to be cash-flow positive, a sequel is usually a better bet than an original film to at least not lose money. But where Joker was shot on a relative shoestring, intended as a standalone experiment outside DCEU canon, its song- and dance-filled sequel — conjured by Phoenix “in a dream” — carried considerable negative costs. Not least, costs included a $20 million payday for its Oscar-winning star to reprise his most famous role and another $12 million for Gaga (in the role of Joker’s criminally insane muse, Harley Quinn), according to entertainment-industry trade publications; intensive VFX; as well as the added expense of exterior filming in New York and Los Angeles (as opposed to states with higher tax subsidies like New Mexico or Georgia). The upshot: a $190-million (some reports place the budget closer to $200 million) jukebox musical with seeming art-house pretensions whose odds of justifying its cost now seem remote.
Its Venice Gambit Failed
In 2019, the buzz surrounding Joker out of the Venice Film Festival became something close to culturally deafening. As advanced word had it, the Scorsese-esque drama (that owed clear inspiration to Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy) was gritty, violent, and disturbing with the potential to inspire real-life panic in the streets: a kind of cinematic love letter to incels, school shooters, and other embittered outsiders. Rather than put potential viewers off, however, Joker’s “dangerous movie” renown ended up putting butts in seats beyond any reasonable expectation.
Hence Warners’ now-disastrous choice to program the sequel in competition at Europe’s top-tier awards-season blast-off pad. Several Oscar campaign strategists I consulted insist premiering Folie à Deux in Venice was a gigantic mistake (even if the press corps there is known to be more fawning and sympathetic than its North American counterpart). The seeming opposite of a good ol’-fashioned crowd-pleaser, Joker 2’s displeasing qualities were immediately shouted from the critical rooftops to create an “I heard that movie sucks” word-of-mouth pass along. One from which Joker 2 continued to suffer right through its opening weekend. As the thinking goes, if Warner Bros. had screened the movie more strategically — kept it out the fall festivals, and gave first showings to amiable fanboys and influencers — the studio could have better controlled the word of mouth around the sequel, as well as its opening-weekend Tomatometer score.
It Wasn’t a Musical … Or Was It?
Reviews out of Venice alerted fans they could expect Gaga and Phoenix to break into song at key moments, belting out time-burnished pop standards like “My Way,” “What the World Needs Now Is Love,” “When You’re Smiling,” and “That’s Life.” The movie’s trailer showcases not a little bit of Phoenix singing some of those songs and a primary PR talking point emphasized how Gaga recorded 20 performances for her embodiment of Harley Quinn. But to hear it from the multiplatinum-selling “Poker Face” chanteuse and Phillips during festival press conferences, it would be wrong to categorize Joker 2 under the M-word. “I wouldn’t necessarily say this is a musical in a lot of ways,” Gaga said. “The way that music is used is to really give the characters a way to express what they need to say because the scene and just the dialogue is not enough.” Added Phillips: “Most of the music in the movie is really just dialogue. It’s just Arthur not having the words to say what he wants, so he sings them instead.”
Folie à Deux is, of course, a musical — a genre that, by its very definition, uses singing when spoken dialogue is insufficient. Phillips, for his part, later walked back his statements, admitting: “It has all the elements of a musical. But I guess what I mean by it is, all the musicals I’ve seen leave me happy at the end.”
