Joker: Folly à Deux
Rebecca Rubin
A movie set in a hugely popular comic book universe makes $1B at the box office – an all-time record for an R-rated film – scores 11 Oscar nominations – for said R-rated comic book movie, no less – and sees its lead, Joaquin Phoenix, win best actor playing the iconic Joker character. What was supposed to be a single film gets a follow-up quickly greenlit. And then it adds Lady Gaga to the cast. Storybook sequel, right? Plot twist:
“Joker: Folie à Deux,” a genre-bending sequel to the billion-dollar comic book smash, hit a sour note at the box office even as it opened to No. 1 with $40 million.
Those discordant domestic ticket sales were behind initial projections of $50 million to $65 million — a range that was already revised down in the subsequent weeks since “Joker 2” landed on pre-release tracking with $70 million. Opening weekend revenues were significantly lower than its predecessor, 2019’s “Joker,” which set an October record with a stellar $96.2 million during the same weekend a half a decade ago. As for “Folie à Deux,” this start is disastrous for Warner Bros. considering the blockbuster success of the original and the reality that poor word-of-mouth will likely doom its big-screen staying power. That’s a problem because the R-rated sequel carries a substantial $200 million price tag (the first film was produced for a trim $65 million). So, “Folie à Deux” needs to generate at least $450 million to break even, according to sources familiar with the film’s financials.
When you first hear/see a $40M opening, you probably think: wow, impressive! Not for this film. This is a massive yikes for basically everyone involved, as I suspected last week:
By most accounts, the second Joker movie also isn't very good – it has a Metacritic score two points below Megalopolis! – and I surely the box office will suffer as a result. But again, not only because of that. The first Joker was right place/right time. It clearly tapped into a zeitgeist. This second film doesn't seem to have that working for it. It won't perform as badly as Megalopolis, of course. But perhaps were it not a sequel to one of the most successful R-rated movies of all time, involving major comic book IP, it might!
That Metacritic score is now 10 points below Megalopolis. A film that opened to $4M. On its way to that billion dollar box office, the first Joker opened to almost $100M five years ago. This was the era of Avengers: Endgame. But just as that narrative arc was coming to an end, there was clearly an audience for a new take on comic book IP. In walks Todd Phillips with a truly dark, demented Joker. This was not a Zack Snyder movie. This was right time, right tone, right place, right character. The sequel would seem to be almost the opposite – back to Rubin:
The original “Joker” became an unexpected hit with $335 million domestically and $743 million internationally, standing as the highest-grossing R-rated movie in history at the time. (“Deadpool & Wolverine” supplanted that record over the summer with $1.32 billion). Yet it could become a challenge for the follow-up film to reach its breakeven point because critics and audiences haven’t liked the film. It received a 33% “rotten” rating on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, as well as a “D” CinemaScore from moviegoers. Muted buzz for “Folie à Deux” began at Venice Film Festival, where “Joker” took home the fest’s top prize in 2019. Yet critics and festival attendees weren’t as enthusiastic about the sequel, leading to weeks of “meh” reviews before general audiences saw the movie.
Naturally, I had to look up the all-important ovation metric. 10-minutes! No, 11-minutes! No – 12 minutes! What comical bullshit.
This outcome is a good reminder that at the end of the day, making a good movie still matters. That's subjective, sure. But it was pretty clear leading up to this opening that there was some real negative energy around this movie. Were they trolling the audience? Was it just a swing and miss? It's almost hard to blame them for trying something else wild here – a musical, literally dreamed up by Phoenix – given how hard that first movie was to watch and yet still garnered that result. But again, it was just right place/right time. And I laid out at the time how I thought they should do a sequel in light of it:
And in the end, we still get that iconic burglary/murder, which Bruce witnesses, and sets him on a path. All of this would seem to imply we’re going to get the flip side to this story — the gritty, ultra-violent Batman. Director Todd Phillips says it’s not happening, that they would “never” do that. We’ll see. Such pronouncements have a funny way of morphing over time. And I find it hard to believe they would spend so much time on the Bruce Wayne bits to not take that low-hanging fruit, eventually. If they make that movie, that’s the only time I could see myself watching Joker again, to prepare for it.
And while it may now seem too vainglorious given the box office success — money wins, and all that — I think a Batman movie set in this universe would make the Joker movie 100x better as a result. You need a movie to show that Bruce Wayne suffers from some of the same mental afflictions as his foil, and is demented in his own way, but takes an opposite road. For the most part, anyway. It isn’t so black-and-white, of course. This needs to happen.
Too conventional? Perhaps. But how great would such a sequel have been? And again, they set it up. Instead, we got basically the opposite, it seems.
Perhaps it should be no surprise that Phillips is "retiring" from the franchise after this. The first film made that billion while costing just over $50M to make. The sequel cost $200M to to make. It undoubtedly won't make even that back at the box office, let alone that nearly $500M number needed to break-even. Yikes.
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler