After Months Of Hype, Joker: Folie à Deux Seriously Underwhelms At The Weekend Box Office

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Box office expectations for Todd Phillips' Joker: Folie à Deux have been building for months (if not years). When Joker came out in 2019, it ended up being a phenomenon – not just earning over $1 billion worldwide, but becoming the highest grossing R-rated film of all time and earning star Joaquin Phoenix an Academy Award. Movie-goers around the world anticipated that its sequel would be able to garner as much buzz and enthusiasm, particularly with Lady Gaga in a prominent supporting role... but that didn't end up happening.

Instead, Joker: Folie à Deux is quickly turning into a debacle. The extremely expensive follow-up film has been getting rough treatment from critics and audiences alike, and it has resulted in underwhelming box office numbers in its opening weekend. Check out the full Top 10 below and join me after for analysis.

Joker: Folie à Deux Stuns With An Extremely Mild Opening Weekend

As noted, Joker was a massive hit when it was released in late 2019, and it wasn't a film that had to slowly find an audience. The movie promised to be a new and different kind of cinematic experience for comic book fans, and loads of hype led the film to earn $96.2 million domestically in its first three days of release – despite the handicap of its R-rating. In the run up to its theatrical release, Joker: Folie à Deux was expected to put up similar numbers... but that didn't happen. It didn't even come close.

According to early results posted by The Numbers, Joker: Folie à Deux is making less than half of what the 2019 movie brought in during its opening weekend. Making $40 million during an opening weekend in 2024 isn't by itself a total disaster (it's the fifteenth biggest debut of the year, slightly behind the $42 million earned by Fede álvarez's Alien: Romulus in August), but compared to what prognosticators prognosticated, it's a very bad start.

It wouldn't be an issue if Joker: Folie à Deux was made with a budget similar to its predecessor... but the filmmakers and the studio got extremely cocky with the follow-up film. According to a Variety report back in February, Joker was made for a modest $60 million, but the musical follow-up cost nearly four times as much, with reported production costs in the $200 million range. The sequel would be in a solid financial position if opening weekend ticket sales remained consistent, but they didn't, and it appears now as though the Joaquin Phoenix/Lady Gaga movie is going to have a legacy as one of 2024's box office debacles.

In addition to its rough debut, Joker: Folie à Deux appears as though it has a tough word of mouth problem ahead of it as well. Critiques first started arriving online following the movie's premiere at the Venice Film Festival (you can read my 2.5 star Joker: Folie à Deux CinemaBlend review posted last month), and while there wasn't an overwhelming amount of love for the release right off the bat, things have gotten much worse for the title following its theatrical arrival. In addition to having nearly matching rough scores on Rotten Tomatoes, the title has earned a "D" grade from surveys handed out by CinemaScore (the previous film, despite its grimness, earned a "B+")

While the film is not performing well domestically, there is a silver lining that comes from foreign markets. So far, Joker: Folie à Deux has made $81 million from outside the United States and Canada, which brings its worldwide total to $121 million. That being said, ticket sales are expected to plummet in the weeks ahead, and the aforementioned budget for the sequel doesn't include publicity and marketing costs.

How this will ultimately affect the box office in the macro sense for the rest of October will be an interesting development to watch. There was expectation in the industry that Joker 2 would be a dominant title all month, but the chances of it repeating at number one in next weekend's box office Top 10 seem slim. That could create opportunity for the big titles set to arrive in theaters in the weeks ahead (including Kelly Marcel's Venom: The Last Dance and Parker Finn's Smile 2... but it also may end up deflating the market.

Needless to say, next weekend's ticket sales will be interesting.

The Wild Robot Has A Soft Drop Amid Awesome Buzz

The rough performance of Joker: Folie à Deux is a bummer for anyone rooting for the health of the industry, but one positive to take away from this weekend's box office results is the performance by Chris Sanders' The Wild Robot. Despite opening at number one last Sunday, the new release from DreamWorks Animation didn't have what could be called a blockbuster debut when it arrived in theaters at the end of September, but one thing the film has going for it is that just about everybody who sees it falls in love with it (I, for one, gave The Wild Robot 4.5 stars in my CinemaBlend review). The movie has earned wonderful appreciation from critics and audiences, and that positivity resulted in what could be called a successful second Friday-to-Sunday.

Bumped down to second place because of the release of Joker: Folie à Deux, The Wild Robot added $18.7 million domestically to its coffers in the last three days, which is a soft 48 percent weekend-to-weekend drop following its solid debut. To date, the animated film featuring the voices of Lupita Nyong'o and Pedro Pascal has made $64 million in the United States and Canada, and when combined with the ticket sales abroad ($35.5 million), the title has earned over $100 million worldwide. Those results aren't exactly comparable to Mike Mitchell's Kung Fu Panda 4 or Kelsey Mann's Inside Out 2 from earlier in the year, but not being a sequel, it also doesn't have the advantage of having a massive built-in audience.

Looking ahead to next week, the current slate of titles will have some interesting new movies to compete with, as Ali Abbasi's The Apprentice starring Sebastian Stan, Damien Leone's vomit-inducing slasher Terrifier 3, and Morgan Neville's Pharrell Williams biopic Piece By Piece, and Jason Reitman's Saturday Night will all be arriving in wide release. Be sure to head back here to CinemaBlend next Sunday to check out the weekend box office results, and head over to our 2024 Movie Release Calendar to discover all of the titles set to hit theaters and streaming in the remaining weeks/months of the year.