It’s not an exaggeration to say that Warner Bros. is not happy right now. Still reeling from its expensive action prequel Furiosa disappointing at the box office over the summer, the legendary studio suffered further embarrassment when its long-awaited, $190 million follow-up to the billion-dollar-grossing 2019 hit Joker, Joker: Folie á Deux, flopped, grossing an embarrassing $37.8 million over three days. To put this in context, just over a month ago, the movie was projected to make over $100 million in its opening weekend.
What happened? Well, that’s a topic for another article, but the simple version is this: if it isn’t good, and no one is asking for it, people won’t see it. Period. Now the problem for WB is this: if few people wanted to see Joker 2 on the first weekend, what makes them think more will come on the second weekend?
That’s what may happen in the next three days as Joker: Folie á Deux is expected to drop at least 70% at the box office. That’s roughly in line with last year’s comic book flop The Marvels, which also debuted with a soft $46 million before dropping a massive 78% in its second weekend with a meager $10.1 million gross. For non-math nerds out there, that’s around $8 million to $10 million for the DC Comics sequel. Ouch.
What makes this worse is that the Joaquin Phoenix-led musical will be knocked off its first-place perch by a horror sequel that cost around $5 million to make. Terrifier 3, the latest chapter in the increasingly popular, and increasingly gory, franchise, is projected to gross at least $10 million, with an expectation that it will overperform and may hit $15 million by the end of next Sunday. That’s stunning for any film, much less one like Terrifier 3, to supplant a heavily hyped studio movie in its second weekend. That just doesn’t happen, ever, and it’s likely it will happen now.
It’s a bit poetic that a movie about a man who puts on clown makeup to mobilize an army of anti-social misfits will be defeated by a horror movie starring Art the Clown, who mainly appeals to the audience that the first Joker brought it all the way back in 2019. I just hope Terrifier 4 doesn’t have any musical numbers with Art tap-dancing on someone’s spleen.
Joker: Folie á Deux and Terrifier 3 are playing in theaters. Skip both and watch The Dark Knight again on Max instead.