Nobody is laughing over at Warner Bros. Discovery today, as Joker: Folie à Deux has bombed at the opening weekend box office harder than Arthur Fleck’s (Joaquin Phoenix) stand-up comedy routines. The movie ended up with an abysmal $40 million at the box office, including Thursday night previews.
In fact, that means more than half the opening weekend was made up of those Thursday night previews at $7 million, and Friday at $13 million. Saturday fell to $11.4 million, with Sunday expected to gross the movie the remaining $8.6 million. Not the trajectory any movie wants to go in, even if it is taking the number one slot.
This is partly surprising because pre-opening, the movie was tracking well. The first Joker in 2019 opened to $96.2 million and ended up grossing a stunning $1.079 billion worldwide. In fact, it was the highest-grossing R-rated movie ever, until this year’s Deadpool & Wolverine.
This opening, however, puts it in the range of bombs like The Marvels ($47 million) and Morbius ($39 million), though not as low as Madame Web ($17.6 million).
However, not boding well for its further box office prospects is the rare alignment between critics’ reviews and fan reaction. On Rotten Tomatoes, it sits at 33% with 258 critics’ reviews, and 31% with 2,500+ fan ratings. Worse still, it got a “D” CinemaScore which asks early moviegoers whether they would recommend the movie as they exit the theater. That puts it below Francis Ford Coppola’s recent dud, Megalopolis, which got a D+.
While the movie was always going to be a challenge to sell, as it’s a musical sequel coming five years after the original, it does reunite Phoenix with writer/director Todd Phillips. It also adds Lady Gaga as Harleen Quinzel and comes at a time when there’s not a ton of comic book-based fare in theaters. It was even released on the exact same day as the previous one (October 4). Yet audiences seem to be summarily rejecting the movie.
Will it have legs past this weekend? Bad word of mouth seems to say “no.” And we’ve already speculated that it should be streaming in about a month, which might further cut into box office prospects. As is, the only joke here looks like it might be Joker 2 itself.
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