MOVIE NEWS – Joker 2 also cost 200 million dollars, more than three times as much as the original…

“You either die a hero or you live long enough to become the villain.” This sentence from The Dark Knight is an excellent example of what Warner Bros. can experience with the reception of Joker 2 – its official title being Folie à Deux. The sequel to the most successful DC comic book movie of all time could be one of the biggest failures in the history of superhero movies.

A few hours ago, it was revealed that Hollywood estimates a US opening of $40 million for Joker 2. Let’s nail it down: that would have been an excellent number for the original movie, which only cost $55 million. But not in the case of the $190 million Two-Person Madness. Adding global earnings brings the gross to $121.1 million.

Worse CinemaScore than Madame Web?!

The film’s release falls short of recent genre flops like Marvel’s, which grossed just over $46 million in 2023. The bad news for Joker: Folie à Deux is that its advertising promises to be the most unsuccessful campaign in recent years, which we have seen from a DC or Marvel-based production. This is so much so that the market research company CinemaScore rated the film a D, which is even lower than Madame Web’s C+ at the beginning of the year.

Things aren’t looking good on Rotten Tomatoes either, with its recommendation already down to 33%.

The numbers for Joker: Folie à Deux fall far short of recent estimates, which were already pessimistic. BoxOfficePro, for example, predicted $50 million to $60 million for its U.S. debut.

Joker 2 is another failure for Warner Bros. and DC

The commercial failure of the Joker sequel is re-opening the wound for Warner Bros.’s superhero franchise. The first part was one of the biggest successes. The only absolute success next to Batman in the last five years. However, the new instalment joins a long list of disappointments that the studio hopes to rectify under James Gunn. His first cinema project will be Superman, which will arrive next July.

Ultimately, to paraphrase the sentence we opened this article with, maybe it would have been better if Warner Bros. had let the Joker die as a big hit and not dragged this saga out so long that it was worth its own downfall…

Source: Variety