Joker: Folie À Deux wins the weekend box office, but sure isn't smiling
[html]The Todd Phillips sequel may have brought in $40 million, but this is no laughing matter for Warner Bros.
Joker: Folie À Deux may be turning into Todd Phillips' own villain origin story. Things went from bad to worse for the unsmiling sequel this weekend. First, it received a rare D CinemaScore from the Vegas-based firm that measures how much moviegoers enjoyed—or in this case, absolutely despised—a movie after sitting through it. (For context, that's even worse than the D+ score for Megalopolis—a movie that saw multiple walkouts in screenings attended by The A.V. Club alone. No wonder Coppola felt co*pelled to step in to defend his fellow bomb this past weekend.)
There's nothing to sing about for the Lady Gaga and Joaquin Phoenix-led disaster at the box office either. Sure, the film technically won the weekend, with $40 million to The Wild Robot's $19 million. But this is still an unmitigated low note for Warner Bros., who spent $190 million to make the thing—more than three times as much as the original Joker, according to The Hollywood Reporter. The film was projected to open at $50 million or $60 million, the trade reports, which was already a downgrade from last month's original projection of $70 million. Deadline notes that this is one of the lowest sequel openings for a co*ic book film ever—even worse than notorious MCU bomb The Marvels—meaning superhero fatigue may have turned into full-on narcolepsy.
There is some good news for Folie À Deux, however. Deadline reports that it's not the lowest opening for a DC movie ever. That honor goes to the Josh Brolin epic Jonah Hex, which no one saw (it opened at a mere $5.3 million). It also scored a big win for movie musicals; its opening weekend netted more than the entire domestic gross of Cats ($27.1 million) in 2019. Way to go, Joker!
The rest of the top 10, via Box Office Mojo, is below:
- Joker: Folie à Deux, $40 million
- The Wild Robot, $18.7 million
- Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, $10.3 million
- Transformers One, $5.4 million
- Speak No Evil, $2.8 million
- Sam and Colby: The Legends of the Paranormal, $1.8 million
- White Bird, $1.5 million
- Deadpool & Wolverine, $1.5 million
- The Substance, $1.3 million
- Megalopolis, $1 million
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Source: Joker: Folie À Deux wins the weekend box office, but sure isn't smiling (http://ht**://www.avclub.c**/weekend-box-office-joker-folie-a-deux-bomb)