Hollywood estimates said, on Sunday, the film would make $39 million over the weekend. They can estimate the box office take on Sunday because they have Thursday, Friday, and Saturday numbers (and remember, Thursday is now considered "the weekend"), and there is a pretty good rule of thumb that Sunday's numbers will be 65-80% of Saturday's. (Or whatever -- I don't know the rule of thumb, just that it exists.)
Warner Bros. shrieked that this $39 million figure was fake and insisted that it would make $40 million or more. They were playing the game that retailers do when they charge $39.99 for something instead of $40. Except in this case, they wanted the number to appear bigger.
They campaigned to get media headlines changed from a $39 million estimate to $40+ million. Some complied.
But the actual figures were even lower than the $39 million estimate, as terrible, and I mean terrible, word of mouth depressed Sunday's takings.
Variety calls it a "tragic" box office performance.
"Joker: Folie à Deux" suffered an even worse box office debut than initially expected. The off-beat comic book sequel, starring Joaquin Phoenix and Lady Gaga, brought in a tragic $37.8 million in its first weekend of release. By comparison, the original "Joker" earned $39 million on Friday alone in 2019.
Initial tracking was closer to $70 million, but those projections shrank dramatically in recent weeks to $50 million to $60 million. Monday's final tally is below Sunday's estimate of $40 million, which was flop territory for the $200 million-budgeted tentpole. With bad buzz and terrible word-of-mouth (including a rare "D" grade on CinemaScore), "Joker 2" didn't come close to matching the start of "Joker," which set an October opening weekend record with $96.2 million. The polarizing reception will likely doom its big-screen staying power.
The movie made $80 million overseas, which sounds good until you compare it with the first film's opening weekend overseas takings -- $136 million.
Many were saying the film is a deliberate "F*** You" to the audience that supported the original.
Even leftwing fake news outlet Rolling Stone admits this now:
The audience did not appreciate this sentiment. Cinemascore polls theater-goers as they exit a movie, handing them cards to grade the film. Grace Randolph said that "D" is the lowest rating on the card. They don't allow F's.
Joker 2's grade? A D. It's the first comic book movie to receive this grade-- and there have been many, many terrible comic book movies, of course.
But I guess people don't like being told to go f*** themselves.
It has long, long been the case that Stunning and Brave Artistes think they are above making genre fare. To signal that they are superior to the films (or comic books) they're making, they deliberately subvert them, crack jokes about them in the films and books themselves, and otherwise signal that this is very stupid material, and therefore the audience is also stupid for attempting to enjoy it.
As a James Bond fan, I was long, long annoyed by the franchise's habit of undermining the very fantasy the audience came to see by inserting fourth-wall breaking jokes that scream "All of this is silly and stupid and you're silly and stupid for trying to enjoy it."
This is extremely common in genre fare. The Stunning and Brave Artistes hate the material, hate that they're lowering themselves to produce such garbage, and fill their "art" with lots of signals that they're above the material, and that the material is stupid. This of course demolishes the product they're putting out, but the important thing is communicating to their peers in the industry that are just slumming, and that they have elevated tastes and should be given projects more worthy of them.
It's poisonous and destructive, and Hollywood, and now the formerly mainstream comic book industry, just can't help doing it. They want you to know they're slumming. And therefore, if you are a patron of this stuff, you're a slum-dweller.
This actually works the other way, too. I would argue that Zack Snyder was embarrassed by how silly Superman and Batman are, and therefore made his films grimmer and "darker" than the source material could bear. No, he wasn't undermining the films by joking, but he was undermining the source material by essentially declaring that they were too childish and light for him and therefore needed to be changed to "improve" them.
What's the right take? Well, Superman made a ton of money and was a crowd-pleaser. It took the material seriously -- Richard Donner's watchword was "versimilitude" -- without losing the fundamentally light, fun tone of a comic book.
When Donner had Superman look directly at the audience he wasn't undermining the movie by saying "This is all stupid." Instead, he was having a little fun and having Superman look right at the audience and form a sly little bond. Superman was letting us in on his secret.
Anyway, this isn't even a problem of "wokeness." They've been doing this as long as I've been alive. The James Bond movies constantly burst the bubble of suspended disbelieve. In the 80s, when action movies were making money but Stunning and Brave Artistes were sick of having to make them, they constantly inserted tasteless "comedy" into action scenes and otherwise forbid anyone in the audience from getting lost in the story by constantly announcing "This is just a stupid movie."
As I mentioned on Friday, Todd Philips had a different goal here. He had been attacked by the Permanent Twitter Residents for supposedly "inciting incels" to commit violence, and, even worse, telling men that felt excluded from society that others understood their pain.
The much-predicted violence never happened -- but the leftwing Mean Girls still attacked him for attempting to say something about marginalized men.
And so Todd Phillips made a movie for this new Phantom Audience that didn't and never will exist -- the film was made for people who hated the first Joker, and was intended not as a movie but an apology for having made the first one.
And now he's got a disaster on his hands. Warner Bros. will lose a hundred million or more on this disaster.
But the important thing is that Todd Phillips signaled to the right people that he agrees with them.
And bear in mind: The same media that fretted endlessly that the Joker movie might encourage violence also cheerleaded all through the BLM and antifa riots and murders of 2020. They themselves incited marginalized men to commit violence, and praised them as heroes for doing so.
But ah -- those were the right marginalized men. Real heroes like Grosskreutz and the pedophile Rittenhouse shot.
Anyway, the good news for Todd Philips is that Hollywood won't hold this Money Fire disaster against him. He Did The Right Thing. He told the Right People -- the ticket-buying audience -- that they were gross trolls who are beneath the Stunning and Brave Artistes.
I'm sure his, I don't know, biopic of the leaders of the Stonewall Rebellion will get greenlit.
Now that's the right kind of violence to promote.