Joker: Folie à Deux breaks another humiliating box office record

There are certain records you don’t want to break.

You don’t, for example, want to be the first comic book movie to ever score a D from audience exit polls, which Joker: Folie à Deux did in its first weekend of release in the US.

As if that wasn’t humiliation enough, in its second weekend, the Todd Phillips-directed sequel broke another record. But, again, it’s one no one wants.

Joker: Folie à Deux has now recorded the largest-ever drop in ticket sales for a superhero movie. The film saw its box office fall 82 per cent, from an already embarrassing $US37.6 million opening to a dismal $US7.05m in its second weekend.

Previously, The Marvels dropped 78.1 per cent in its second week while The Flash did 72.5 per cent. The comic book genre can record higher declines from opening weekend to the next because it’s front-loaded, meaning fans are more likely to show up early when it opens. But anything higher than a 60 per cent fall is considered not great.

Joker: Folie à Deux is now tracking at $US51.6m from the US and Canada and $US113.7m from international markets for a global total of $US165.3m. The Australian box office for its first week was $5.32m.

It’s a catastrophic result for a film that ran up a reported $US190m in production costs and a further estimated $US100m in marketing and promotions expenses. It would’ve needed to gross north of $US450m to break even.

Joker: Folie à Deux stars Joaquin Phoenix as the DC Comics supervillain Joker, a frequent antagonist to Batman, although the Caped Crusader does not appear in the film.

In the follow-up to the controversial 2019 film, Joker/Arthur Fleck has been incarcerated in Arkham Asylum while waiting for his trial for five murders committed in the previous movie. There, he meets Harleen “Lee” Quinzel (Lady Gaga), a super-groupie obsessed with his murderous persona.

The film is a hybrid musical-courtroom-prison-drama featuring song-and-dance interludes of old jazz standards such as What the World Needs Now is Love.

It has been excoriated by both critics and audiences. Its Rotten Tomatoes critics score is 33 per cent while the audience mark stands at 32 per cent.

The 2019 was a wild commercial success, grossing more than $US1 billion at the global box office and won Phoenix a Best Actor Oscar for his performance. The budget for the first film was $US55m.

Since Joker: Folie à Deux’s release, there have been reports that Phillips enjoyed near-unprecedented creative freedom over his film, with little to no interference from studio executives. Phillips also distanced himself from Warner Bros’ DC Studios bosses James Gunn and Peter Safran, who oversee the rest of the stable.

Phillips also insisted on no test screenings even though it is standard practice, even for spoiler-heavy superhero movies, and despite studio objections, premiered Joker: Folie à Deux at the Venice Film Festival.

The 2019 Joker premiered at Venice and won the festival’s top prize, the Golden Lion, but the 2024 sequel debuted to mixed-to-negative reviews from Italy, which led to a revision of the industry’s initial tracking for the opening weekend box office from $US70m to $US50m, which it still missed.