There have been plenty of comic book films that have left fans of DC and Marvel unimpressed, but you’d be hard pressed to find one that has faced such mass repudiation as “Joker: Folie à Deux” did this weekend.
When it first arrived on pre-release tracking, there were projections for a $70 million opening weekend. By this week, that fell to $50 million. While not a death sentence for a film with a $190 million budget, such a result would have required strong audience buzz for it to be theatrically successful against such a high production cost.
Instead, “Joker: Folie à Deux” received poor audience scores across the board, including the first ever D grade for a comic book film on CinemaScore. The poor word-of-mouth had an immediate and severe effect on the film’s ticket sales, and as of writing on Sunday, the film is now estimated for a $40 million domestic opening, below the $46 million opening of Marvel Studios’ big 2023 bust “The Marvels” and nearly below the $39 million start of Sony’s infamous “Morbius.”
Why such a poor response for a sequel to a film that broke box office records and won Oscars? Director and co-writer Todd Phillips crafted a follow-up that alienated both fans of the first film and potential new fans at the same time: The film directly indicts those who heralded Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck as some sort of outcast hero and portrays him — and those who admire him — as pathetic, and those hoping to see Lady Gaga do her thing are met with muted musical sequences set to old standards. “Joker: Folie á Deux” is, to put it simply, a movie for no one.
Perhaps ironically, a $40 million opening would have been a decent start for the first “Joker” against its $60 million budget, but that film opened to an October record $96 million and became the first R-rated billion dollar hit, scoring 11 Oscar nominations and two wins including Best Actor for Joaquin Phoenix.
With such resounding success, Warner Bros. gave director Todd Phillips top dollar to make “Folie à Deux,” a film that largely replaces the gritty streets of Gotham with courthouse drama scenes, the austere halls of Arkham Asylum, and dream musical sequences featuring Lady Gaga as Lee Quinzel.
And a supermajority of those who saw the film did not like that new formula.
It would be easy to place blame for this failure on the decision to add Lady Gaga and/or musical elements to the sequel of a gritty drama that, while a widespread pop culture phenomenon, particularly resonated with younger male moviegoers who identified with Arthur Fleck and his growing rage at how he and others like him were being cast aside by Gotham City at large. But deeper examination of “Folie à Deux” and Phillips’ core themes are required.
Through Arthur’s turbulent relationship with Lee and his high-profile trial for the crimes he committed as Joker, Phillips explores how his protagonist’s infamous alter ego may have given Arthur the adulation he couldn’t get as a failed comedian and made him the patron saint of Gotham’s outcasts, but it has done nothing to break the cycle of abuse he finds himself trapped in as his adoring followers — including Lee — value him as a symbol, not as the human being beneath the facepaint.
Some critics like TheWrap’s William Bibbiani, Indiewire’s David Ehrlich and Rolling Stone’s David Fear have put forth an interpretation of the film as one where Phillips also questions whether fans of his 2019 hit feel the same way about Arthur by denying them the vengeful violence that permeated the first film.
“’Folie à Deux’” does not give the people what they want,” Ehrlich wrote. “On the contrary, it actively courts the disappointment of its own fandom in order to articulate how cruelly Arthur is co-opted by the fantasies of the collective unconscious — lost in a dream that his followers want to have for themselves.”
But the way Phillips and “Folie à Deux” go about this wasn’t found compelling by critics or audiences at large. The film’s musical sequences inside Arthur’s head — presented in a deliberately unpolished style and with Gaga throttling the showstopping voice that made her a Grammy and Oscar winner — are unlikely to please Gaga’s Little Monsters or fans of the jukebox hits and movie musicals that are darkly remixed.
Its parade of emotional, physical, and implied sexual abuse suffered by Arthur in between those musical numbers probably won’t win over the casual moviegoers or prestige audiences that made “Joker” a crossover awards winner and gave it the “can’t miss” status that drove it to a billion dollars.
And most of all, Arthur’s final fate, abandoned and consumed by the rage-filled movement he began, will anger many of the fans who came to embrace Arthur Fleck as an addition to the decades of Joker canon in DC comics and films.
To put it bluntly, Todd Phillips, Joaquin Phoenix, Lady Gaga and the rest of the “Joker: Folie à Deux” team put forth a cinematic vision that alienated or dissatisfied every potential audience subset, and that has led to its box office fortunes entering free fall.
Because of that, there’s not too much that the financial failure of this film says about the future of Warner Bros. or its separate and soon-to-be-rebooted DC Cinematic Universe except perhaps this: Insiders at the studio say that while they’re disappointed with how the weekend has unfolded, they stand by the decision to give Phillips free rein to make the sequel that he wanted.
And that is consistent with the director-first strategy that Warner Bros.’ film division has taken with a significant portion of its slate under the leadership of Michael De Luca and Pam Abdy. Going back to last year’s studio record smash hit “Barbie,” most of the Warner releases were films with singular directorial voices driving them.
“Barbie” was unmistakably a Greta Gerwig film with its sharp humor and feminist voice. “Wonka” displayed all the earnest sweetness and whimsy that director Paul King used to make “Paddington” a smash hit. Denis Villeneuve’s brooding yet epic brand of sci-fi is all over “Dune: Part Two,” and Tim Burton made exactly the sort of “Beetlejuice” sequel one would expect from him. All of these films were box office hits.
But sometimes, those auteur visions just don’t pan out. George Miller’s “Furiosa” was unmistakably a “Mad Max” film like all the other installments of his post-apocalyptic series, but those who weren’t hardcore fans just weren’t interested in a “Fury Road” spinoff nine years after that film’s release. “Horizon: An American Saga — Chapter 1,” a film Warner only handled distribution on, was an uncompromised three-hour Western from Kevin Costner that went largely ignored outside a select few in certain parts of the U.S.
Through the hits and flops, this is the strategy that Warner Bros. is sticking with, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future: bring in filmmakers with a singular vision, and give them the keys.
As for Phillips and “Joker,” we’ve no doubt seen the last of this corner of the DC universe. The sequel itself was a surprise given that “Joker” was planned as a one-off, but Phillips has already said he’s moving on. In response to a question about a potential “Joker 3” at the Venice Film Festival debut of “Folie á Deux,” Phillips replied with a laugh, “Did you see the movie?”
