Joker: Folie À Deux wins the weekend box office, but sure isn't smiling

Joker: Folie À Deux may be turning into Todd Phillips’ own villain origin story. Things went from bad to worse for the unsmiling sequel this weekend. First, it received a rare D CinemaScore from the Vegas-based firm that measures how much moviegoers enjoyed—or in this case, absolutely despised—a movie after sitting through it. (For context, that’s even worse than the D+ score for Megalopolis—a movie that saw multiple walkouts in screenings attended by The A.V. Club alone. No wonder Coppola felt compelled to step in to defend his fellow bomb this past weekend.)

There’s nothing to sing about for the Lady Gaga and Joaquin Phoenix-led disaster at the box office either. Sure, the film technically won the weekend, with $40 million to The Wild Robot‘s $19 million. But this is still an unmitigated low note for Warner Bros., who spent $190 million to make the thing—more than three times as much as the original Joker, according to The Hollywood Reporter. The film was projected to open at $50 million or $60 million, the trade reports, which was already a downgrade from last month’s original projection of $70 million. Deadline notes that this is one of the lowest sequel openings for a comic book film ever—even worse than notorious MCU bomb The Marvels—meaning superhero fatigue may have turned into full-on narcolepsy.  

There is some good news for Folie À Deux, however. Deadline reports that it’s not the lowest opening for a DC movie ever. That honor goes to the Josh Brolin epic Jonah Hex, which no one saw (it opened at a mere $5.3 million). It also scored a big win for movie musicals; its opening weekend netted more than the entire domestic gross of Cats ($27.1 million) in 2019. Way to go, Joker!

The rest of the top 10, via Box Office Mojo, is below:

1. Joker: Folie à Deux, $40 million
2. The Wild Robot, $18.7 million
3. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, $10.3 million
4. Transformers One, $5.4 million
5. Speak No Evil, $2.8 million
6. Sam and Colby: The Legends of the Paranormal, $1.8 million
7. White Bird, $1.5 million
8. Deadpool & Wolverine, $1.5 million
9. The Substance, $1.3 million
10. Megalopolis, $1 million