‘Joker 2’ stumbles at box office

AP:

Joker: Folie à Deux is the No. 1 movie at the box office, but it might not be destined for a happy ending.

In a turn of events that only Arthur Fleck would find funny, the follow-up to Todd Phillips’ 2019 origin story about the Batman villain opened in theatres nationwide on the weekend to a muted $40 million, according to studio estimates Sunday, less than half that of its predecessor. The collapse was swift and has many in the industry wondering: How did the highly anticipated sequel to an Oscar-winning, billion-dollar film with the same creative team go wrong?

Just three weeks ago, tracking services pegged the movie for a $70-million début, which would still have been down a fair amount from Joker’s record-breaking $96.2 million launch in October 2019. Reviews were mixed out of the Venice Film Festival, where it premièred in competition like the first movie and even got a 12-minute standing ovation.

But the homecoming glow was short-lived, and the fragile foundation would crumble in the coming weeks with its Rotten Tomatoes score dropping from 63 per cent at Venice to 33 per cent by its first weekend in theatres. Perhaps even more surprising were the audience reviews: Ticket buyers polled on opening night gave the film a deadly D CinemaScore. Exit polls from PostTrak weren’t any better. It got a meagre half star out of five possible.

Joker: Folie à Deux cost at least twice as much as the first film to produce, though reported figures vary at exactly how pricey it was to make. Phillips told Variety that it was less than the reported $200 million; Others have it pegged at $190 million. Warner Bros. released the film in 4,102 locations in North America. About 12.5 per cent of its domestic total came from 415 IMAX screens.

Internationally, it’s earned $81.1 million from 25,788 screens, bringing its total global earnings estimate to $121.1 million. In the next two weeks, Joker 2 will also open in Japan and China.

Second place went to Universal and DreamWorks Animation’s The Wild Robot, which added $18.7 million in its second weekend, bringing its domestic total to nearly $64 million. Globally, it’s made over $100 million. Warner Bros.’ Beetlejuice Beetlejuice took third place in weekend five, Paramount’s Transformers One landed in fourth and Universal and Blumhouse’s Speak No Evil rounded out the top five.

The other big new release of the weekend, Lionsgate’s White Bird, flopped with just $1.5 million from just over 1,000 locations, despite an A+ CinemaScore.

Overall, the weekend is up from the same frame last year, but Joker’s” start is an unwelcome twist for theatre owners hoping to narrow the box office deficit.

Phillips and star Joaquin Phoenix have said they aspired to make something as “audacious” as the first film. The sequel added Lady Gaga into the fold, as a Joker superfan, and delved further into the mind of Arthur Fleck, imprisoned at Arkham and awaiting trial for the murders he committed in the first. It’s also a musical, with elaborately imagined song and dance numbers to old standards. Gaga even released a companion album called Harlequin, alongside the film.

In his review for The Associated Press, Jake Coyle wrote that “Phillips has followed his very antihero take on the Joker with a very anti-sequel. It combines prison drama, courthouse thriller and musical, and yet turns out remarkably inert given how combustible the original was.”

The sequel has already been the subject of many think pieces, some who posit that the sequel was deliberately alienating fans of the first movie. In cruder terms, it’s been called a “middle finger”. But fans often ignore the advice of critics, especially when it comes to opening their wallets to see revered comic book characters on the big screen.

It has some high-profile defenders too: Francis Ford Coppola, who last week got his own D+ CinemaScore for his pricey, ambitious and divisive film Megalopolis, entered the Joker chat with an Instagram post.

“@ToddPhillips films always amaze me and I enjoy them thoroughly,” Coppola wrote. “Ever since the wonderful The Hangover he’s always one step ahead of the audience never doing what they expect.”