Not a laughing matter... Joker: Folie à Deux hit theatres worldwide last Friday, and it’s official: the punchline hasn’t landed. The follow-up to Todd Phillips’ Oscar-winning 2019 Joker origin story opened in US theaters to a muted $40 million according to studio estimates Sunday, which is less than half that of its predecessor. Tracking services had pegged the movie for a $70 million debut, which would still have been down from Joker’s record-breaking $96.2 million launch in October 2019. Internationally, it has earned $81.1 million, bringing its total global earnings estimate to $121.1 million.
This is a sizeable headache for the director and Warner Bros., as Joker: Folie à Deux cost at least twice as much as the first film to produce, though reported figures vary at exactly how pricey it was to make. Phillips told Variety that it was less than the reported $200 million, while others have it pegged at $190 million. For context, Joker – which stood as the highest-grossing R-rated movie in history before Deadpool & Wolverine supplanted that record over the summer with $1.32 billion - was produced for $65 million. This means that Joker: Folie à Deux needs to generate at least $450 million to break even, according to Variety.
As if the poor reviews and the box office numbers weren't bad enough, Joker: Folie à Deux has also set a new record. And a bad one at that. It now has the lowest CinemaScore in the history of the rating system for a comic book movie: D. Yep, it’s just Folie à D now. Just think of every middling or downright awful comic book movie of the last 30 years... Catwoman, Jonah Hex, Suicide Squad, Elektra, Justice League... Hell, even this year’s dire Madame Web got a C+. And Joker: Folie à Deux has trumped them all to the lowest score yet.
Does it deserve to rank lower than the aforementioned titles? Probably not, but considering the original Joker got a B+, this is another blow. There's also the rare occurrence that sees both critics and audiences in total agreement that the sequel is an almighty flop. It currently holds a 36% “Rotten” in both scores on Rotten Tomatoes. So, how did one of the most highly anticipated films of the year, a sequel to an Oscar-winning, billion-dollar-generating hit with the same creative team go so wrong?
Well, there are thwarted expectations, as evident after the film premiered at this year’s Venice Film Festival. The poor word of mouth did not help. Then there’s the film’s form. Phillips’ bold gambit to stay away from a straightforward psychological thriller but instead create a semi-jukebox musical is to be applauded, but it has come at the risk of alienating fans of the original. The sequel is a clumsy missile aimed at toxic fan culture but says little-to-nothing about those who misunderstood Joker. Joker: Folie à Deux antagonizes the audience that enjoyed the first film, and while there’s a particular savvy in that subversion, the film simply has nothing new or interesting to add.
Not even the casting of Lady Gaga as Harleen “Lee” Quinzel helped – especially since her character is underwritten and frustratingly sidelined, when she really should have gotten the double-bill headline slot the marketing promised. The musical numbers she and Joaquin Phoenix feature in are repetitive, on the nose, and reveal themselves to be a half-hearted gimmick. These make Joker: Folie à Deux a nothing movie: neither satirical, serious, nor a full-blown musical.
As per our review: “Despite threads touching upon the warped delusions of the collective unconscious, the cult of personality and how no one cares about the man behind the makeup, Folie À Deux is a hollow show that is gimmicky in the extreme. The fantasy musical numbers are very well shot by cinematographer Lawrence Sher, but as they stack up, they become repetitive and half-baked, lacking verve and folly. (...) A bolder statement would have been to make it a full-blown musical or even invert the focus by having the story unfold entirely from Lee’s perspective.
In the end, the underbaked script betrays the true intentions behind the film, as Joker was supposed to be a standalone film. However, Hollywood needed to make the most of it and bank on a sequel that could catch lightning a bottle a second time. And studio desperation shows through a film which stands as a poor footnote to the original. Whether you have a solid script or not, when your film becomes the first R-rated movie to gross over $1 billion worldwide, studios are going to come knocking with a few extra zeros on that paycheck... A more ambitious gambit would have been to leave Joker as a one off.
Still, there are some defenders... Francis Ford Coppola, who last week got his own D+ CinemaScore for his own pricey flop Megalopolis, posted the following on Instagram:“@ToddPhillips films always amaze me and I enjoy them thoroughly. Ever since the wonderful ‘The Hangover’ he’s always one step ahead of the audience never doing what they expect.” Hmm... One step ahead? Really? Megalopolis is also one sizeable folly, and a disastrous one at that. Box office wise, the film dropped 74% in its second weekend with just over $1 million, bringing its total just shy of $6.5 million - against a $120 million budget.
Ouch. In the next two weeks, Joker: Folie à Deux will open in Japan and China, which might bolster its box office numbers. However, even with a solid intake in those territories, it’s clear that they shouldn’t have sent in the clown for Round 2.
