Joker: Folie À Deux breaks another box office record (bad kind)

Todd Phillips’ Joker: Folie À Deux has broken another major Hollywood record, but not the good kind, like you want. Box office returns for Phillips’ sequel show that it has now surpassed The Marvels for a metric that no one in particular wants to thrive on: The single worst second-week box office drop-off in comic book movie history, with the film’s takings dropping 82 percent from its first week to its second.

We’ll have a more in-depth box office analysis once the wreckage clears on Monday, but it’s worth noting that Phillips’ movie, which brings Joaquin Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck into contact with a version of comic book mainstay Harley Quinn, played by Lady Gaga, isn’t even the most successful murder clown movie in theaters this weekend: Terrifier 3 is kicking the ever-loving fiscal shit out of it. Folie À Deux is expected to bring in a dismal $6.6 million at the domestic box office, falling off a cliff from a $44 million debut. If you take a look at the list of the biggest second week drops in movie history, meanwhile, you can see that the film is actually in contention for the title of biggest drop ever: There are movies that fell further, but a lot of those were re-releases running on single-shot nostalgia appeal, and none of them could match Joker‘s 4,102-theater release. That is a lot of empty real estate, when most of the films with bigger drops were operating in the sub-1,000 range.

As many critics examining the movie’s release have noted, it’s worth remembering that an overwhelming focus on box office returns to the exclusion of all else is a pretty shitty way to evaluate art; say what you like about its execution—including an overwhelming consensus that its marketing-shy musical numbers, ideally the point where Phillips, Phoenix, and Gaga could really let loose, were weirdly listless—but it’s pretty clear Phillips made the movie he wanted to make, not one driven by commercial concerns. On the other hand, it’s also pretty clear that mainstream audiences, who somewhat surprisingly embraced the first film, have rejected this latest effort. What if they held a Joker movie and nobody came? This, as it turns out.

[via THR]