In the words of Heath Ledger’s clown prince of crime, some might scribble, “Why so serious?” In the glass-walled offices of Warner Bros. Discovery this week, executives are pondering the box office collapse of Joker: Folie à Deux. A disastrous opening weekend of $37.7 million, the largest second weekend drop of any DC film (81%), and worldwide box office receipts now at a whopping $165 million…Studio What happened to the original 2019 version, a movie that grossed $1 billion at the time? Is this the highest grossing R-rated movie?
Most of all, the Joker has proven true to his reputation as an agent of chaos. But he’s also one of the most beloved of the famous series’ comic book villains. This disaster was made even more inconceivable by the fact that it was a near-equal draw with Batman himself. Due to strong word of mouth, Joker: Folie à Deux is currently projected to lose between $125 million and $200 million, depending on whose budget estimates you believe. Given the commonly advertised production and marketing budget of $300 million, it’s clear this is holding the film back. The company will need $475 million to break even. Risking a reinvention of a hallowed pop culture icon is much more doable with the first film’s reasonable budget of $60 million.
Knock Knock… Todd Phillips (left) and Joaquin Phoenix attend the premiere of Joker: Folie à Deux in Los Angeles last month. Photo: Michael Buckner/Variety/Getty Images
$300 million is a shocking amount. Money is piling up on screen, with director Todd Phillips and star Joaquin Phoenix being paid $20 million, and supporting actor Lady Gaga $12 million. It accounted for more than a quarter of the production budget of $200 million. But aside from some beautiful lighting and cinematography, and a climactic sequence, the film doesn’t look outrageously extravagant. A locked-room affair set primarily in Arkham State Hospital and a courtroom, there’s virtually nothing like extended CGI pyrotechnics to explain the spending. The most likely explanation is that it was a big gamble born out of pandemic desperation that was sure to be a hit when movie theaters reopened.
This seems doubly shocking considering that Phillips and Phoenix chose to make the film a musical – they were reportedly originally considering it as a Broadway play. (The original stair dance was probably supposed to have served as a warning.) Even on paper, the genre doesn’t promise the kind of profit mandated by the budget unless it’s a children’s cartoon. And as it veers sideways from realism to a farcical musical with cracked voices, it’s never likely to resonate with the original’s core audience of Joker fanboys, let alone the struggles it indulges in. I had nothing to do with the incel merchants who were full of people. I also don’t have a problem with Lady Gaga playing the role, but I don’t think it matches what they’re used to portraying the psycho, sexy Harley Quinn in the past.
It’s not Phillips and Phoenix’s fault that their top-heavy jamboree arrived on the wrong side of the superhero recession plaguing both DC and Marvel. It also hasn’t lost its lightning-in-a-bottle element, as it did when Joker debuted during the Trump presidency in 2019. References to Scorsese’s toxic masculinity classics “Taxi Driver” and “The King of Comedy” were applied like an Instagram filter to touch on exploitative flicks. He revels in themes such as evisceration and oppression, vicarious living through entertainment, and the possibility of demagogy. But it’s in this pairing that this lackluster sequel struggles to harness similar energy for much of its running time. It’s mostly concerned with a dank deconstruction of the Joker’s persona, slapping the audience with yet another easy score about America’s addiction to fame.
Phillips appears to have wanted to course-correct after being accused of indulging in toxic fandom in his previous film. Arthur Fleck’s outright dismissal of the Joker as a pathetic psychological pillar certainly makes his point.
Lady Gaga at the Venice premiere. Photo: Jean Mattia d’Alberto/LaPresse/REX/Shutterstock
But criticizing the fanbase so publicly is tantamount to box office self-harm (which is probably why the director refused to test-screen Joker: Folie à Deux). Because the $300 million budget was waived, Phillips apparently mistook it for an auteur’s film, and reportedly filmed it during a period of change in power between Warner and DC, allowing him to continue working with the director at his mercy. According to Variety, he declined to contact new DC chiefs James Gunn and Peter Safran, saying, “With all due respect to them, this is kind of a Warner Bros. movie.” He is said to have said. However, he also objected to new Warner president David Zaslav’s proposals for budget cuts, including moving filming to London instead of Los Angeles.
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The film’s precipitous decline will have an impact not only on Washington, D.C., which is still struggling, but also beyond. This kind of overly conceptual banter will be banned in blockbuster movies for a while, and you’d think it would force a more conservative re-imagining of other returning icons, especially Bond. Whether this fiasco will give Hollywood pause to think about squeezing beloved intellectual property until it has no more power to give is another question. Does Phillips’ slowness in turning realism into expressionism have anything to do with the fact that this is Joker’s fifth major film in just over 15 years?
Perhaps Phillips, along with the stars of the 1970s, now considers the Folie à Deux debacle as a great act of subversion within the corporate studio system. In the vein of Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider’s anarchic BBS, lunatics take over a mental hospital. Or maybe the film’s tone and message were simply a few months too early. There are powerful moments in this movie. The fact that Fleck can’t help but laugh at the end, even after relinquishing his alter ego, suggests that there is a deep, irreparable violence in America’s sternum. If Trump is elected or challenges Harris’s presidency, Phillips’ ruthless banquet of psychological vomit could start to look frighteningly money-related. Will he still be considered to have had the last laugh?
