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 theaters nationwide this weekend to a muted $40 million, according to studio estimates Sunday, less than half that of its predecessor. The collapse was swift, the AP reports, 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 debut, 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 premiered in competition like the first movie and even got a 12-minute standing ovation. But the homecoming glow was short-lived, with its Rotten Tomatoes score dropping from 63% at Venice to 33% by its first weekend in theaters. 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 meager half-star out of five possible. "That's a double whammy that's very difficult to recover from," said Paul Dergarabedian of Comscore.
Below are estimated ticket sales for Friday through Sunday at US and Canadian theaters, according to Comscore. Final domestic figures will be released Monday.
- 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 Paranormal, $1.8 million.
- White Bird, $1.5 million.
- Deadpool & Wolverine, $1.5 million.
- The Substance, $1.3 million.
- Megalopolis, $1.1 million.
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