Five years ago, Warner Bros. and Todd Phillips’ “Joker” pulled off a series of firsts, including the first comic book film to win the Golden Lion and the Best Actor Oscar, as well as the first R-rated film to gross $1 billion at the global box office.
“Joker: Folie à Deux” will not reach that $1 billion mark, but there’s still a chance that the follow-up can be a hit film for Warner — if fans of the original embrace the musical numbers that take place inside Arthur Fleck’s fractured mind. Warner Bros. is projecting an opening weekend in the $50 million range, which would put it in the neighborhood of the $55 million opening earned by last year’s big DC flop “The Flash.”
Like the first film, reviews for “Folie à Deux” are mixed, currently standing at 56% on Rotten Tomatoes. Back in 2019, those reviews meant little to audiences, who were floored by Joaquin Phoenix’s Oscar-winning performance as a failed, mentally ill comedian pushed to his breaking point by the cruelty of Gotham City, which transformed him into the Clown Prince of Crime and Batman’s greatest adversary.
But pre-release projections suggest that a substantial portion of moviegoers are either uninterested in the changed structure of “Folie à Deux” or simply aren’t interested in more of Phoenix’s Joker even with the addition of Lady Gaga as Lee, Phillips’ interpretation of Joker’s right-hand lady, Harley Quinn.
The projected $50 million opening would be about half of the $96 million that “Joker” opened to in 2019, setting a still-standing record for the highest ever opening weekend in October.
While “Joker” had a $60 million budget, some reports have “Folie à Deux” sporting a production spend of $200 million. Phillips has refuted that figure in interviews, though he did say it cost considerably more to produce this film, which he and Warner do not call a sequel but rather a new story that uses Joker as a framework for Lee’s own character arc.
As part of that arc, Joker and Lee take part in several dream musical sequences over the course of the film, something that has been frequently discussed by Phillips, Gaga and Phoenix during their press tour but is somewhat deemphasized in the film’s trailers. While not to the degree of trailers for other recent musical movies like “Mean Girls,” which did not promote its musical numbers in its marketing at all, “Folie à Deux” opts to focus more on the burgeoning relationship between Arthur and Lee inside Arkham Asylum. As TheWrap pointed out earlier this year, Hollywood has avoided marketing musicals as musicals because the genre carries more financial risks.
Another DC misfire?
With a budget only slightly lower than the CGI-heavy DC spectacles that “Joker” deviated from, is “Folie à Deux” headed for a fate similar to the superhero misfires that Warner Bros. put out last year ahead of James Gunn’s 2025 franchise reboot? Even the best performing of those 2023 films, “Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom,” had to leg out over the holidays to get into break-even territory with $439 million worldwide, less than half of the $1.15 billion the first “Aquaman” made.
As with many movies, it will become clearer how well “Joker 2” is going to do after its second weekend. The $55 million opening for “The Flash” was a letdown given the hype behind it, but it was the brutal 72% drop in its second weekend that sealed its fate. Exhibitor sources said overseas tracking for “Joker 2” is stronger than it was for “The Flash,” which could help lessen the blow if the film can’t leg out domestically.
After loyal fans of “Joker” and Lady Gaga show up alongside each other opening weekend, “Joker 2” will need enough traction to keep it going as the primary moneymaker for theaters in October. If not, that could leave the door open for upcoming sequels like Paramount’s “Smile 2” and Sony’s “Venom: The Last Dance” to draw in moviegoers looking for darker mainstream fare.
In 2019, there were questions about how, exactly, an R-rated DC drama would perform in theaters. Adult-skewing superhero films had worked before with the “Deadpool” films, but those were marketed as comedies, not as a tragic descent of a man into a violent icon for a decaying society. If the film had made just $500 million worldwide, it would have been a success.
But on a budget that was roughly a third of its DC brethren, “Joker” exploded past all expectations and became a cultural phenomenon. Through a mix of an acclaimed actor playing the most famous comic book villain of all time, the buzz from its Venice Film Festival premiere and cultural pearl-clutching about the film possibly inciting real-life violence, “Joker” achieved what no R-rated film had done before: It joined the $1 billion club, becoming the highest grossing film of 2019 not released or produced by Disney.
Now, even with a tentpole budget the studio gave Phillips for his cinematic vision, and higher expectations befitting the return of an actor-character pair that has become iconic, it’s quite possible that “Joker: Folie à Deux” merely performs like a standard October wide release, opening to around $110 million worldwide and finishing with a global total between $400 million and $600 million.
That’s a result theaters will take. And while it won’t provide substantial relief to parent company Warner Bros. Discovery as it weathers the financial storms exacerbated by the decline of linear TV, combined with the domestic success of “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice,” it could tide over the Warner Bros. motion picture division as it hopes to break out in 2025 with a slate driven by auteurs like Bong Joon-ho, Paul Thomas Anderson and Ryan Coogler. The centerpiece will be a “Superman” reboot that Warner is putting its hopes on being the one that can launch DC into a brighter future.
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