‘Joker 2’ Flop In 2024 Threatens Worst-Case Future For DC Studios

As I forecast for you yesterday, Warner Bros. Discovery’s and DC Studios’ Joker: Folie à Deux came in below the widely projected $121.1 million worldwide box office. Expected to be among the year’s biggest blockbusters, does the films status as 2024’s biggest flop threaten a worst-case future for the rebooted DC cinematic universe?


The $119 million worldwide opening weekend for Joker: Folie à Deux, combined with terrible audience scores and equally bad critical reviews, means it will probably suffer above-average weekly declines, so don’t expect the sub-50% drops other successful tentpoles like Deadpool & Wolverine and Inside Out 2 have enjoyed this year.

At this point, signs point toward a final cume in the $250-275 million range, depending a lot on weekday numbers, China’s and Japan’s contributions when the film opens in those markets, and exactly how bad the second weekend drop is.

I modeled based on a modest 60% decline, but if the bottom falls out at 70% for example then all bets are off and we are probably looking at right around a $200 million finish.

As bad as all of this already looks at face value, the result is worse when compared against Joker: Folie à Deux’s enormous budget. Summer tentpole superhero team-up blockbusters typically have equal or lower budgets than this film’s pre-deductions $200 million bill, and that’s before marketing (although the studio avoided equivalent summer tentpole promotional costs, for better or worse).

A significant portion of Joker: Folie à Deux’s budget — approximately $52 million, according to The Hollywood Reporter — went to Todd Phillips’, Joaquin Phoenix’s, and Lady Gaga’s salaries alone (albeit to different degrees, as Gaga reportedly earned $12 million while Phoenix and Phillips split the rest at $20 million each).

Compared against the roughly $4-5 million Phoenix received for Joker back in 2019, the pay raises for the top three names explains a lot of inflation from the first film’s $70 million budget to the sequel’s nearly $200 million budget.

The significance of Joker: Folie à Deux’s financial pain is separate from its artistic merit and reception, obviously, and even the fact it was widely panned by critics and audiences alike is likewise still not an objective measure of its value or merit as a film. But it’s not insignificant when every measurements align to tell us a film is widely deemed an expensive swing and a miss.

The value in studios funding artistic swings and misses is another discussion, of course, and there’s value in discussing it apart from the nuances and particulars we debate over anything else about the films.

But for DC Studios and WBD, right now these are characters, source material, and projects that cost a lot of money to bring to the big screen, and it’s an investment within a profit-driven private corporate entity, competing for audience attention and dollars against similar projects by other corporate entities.

That might sound cynical, but I don’t actually mean it that way — it’s simply the reality of cinema, and it’s always been the reality, however much we often pretend toward some rose-colored idealized Hollywood past.

And however impersonal and cold that math sounds, remember that it represents ultimately the artistic assessments, opinions, discussions, and recommendations among worldwide professional critics of cinema and a mainstream global public. It would be unfair to disregard numbers legitimately reflecting widespread public opinion and reaction to cinematic art created exactly for those audiences and to elicit their reactions. Certainly nobody was insisting that the reviews, audience reactions, box office, and awards were irrelevant with regard to the first Joker film, right?

Negative reviews and bad box office don’t take away from the value of Joker: Folie à Deux for anybody else. Measurements of it are relevant to understanding and discussing not only artistic value, but also financial merits of investing in specific films. Especially since Joker: Folie à Deux’s reception could play a role in influencing audience reception of forthcoming DC projects, and how the studio might react if they anticipate audience backlash.

Without diving too deeply into the past, WB isn’t exactly a stranger to reactive studio leadership abruptly changing course when facing box office adversity. The results of that are precisely why Warner is now starting from scratch next year with writer-director (and DC Studios co-CEO alongside Peter Safran) James Gunn’s Superman.

Since Aquaman swam to $1.1 billion in 2018, eight of the nine DCEU superhero movies have failed to reach even $400 million, with half of them taking less than $200 million in total worldwide box office, and two others failing to reach $300 million. The only bright spots for DC on the big screen for the past six years have been Joker in 2019 and The Batman in 2022.

I’m not rubbing salt in the wound, I’m trying to apply some light and some blunt diagnoses, to determine what it tells us about the risk of reopening the same old wounds again compared to healing and moving on. The DCU has the potential for both, depending very much on how WBD and DC Studios leadership react or don’t react to Joker: Folie à Deux’s failed launch.

Quality is always a factor, but it’s also the hardest to measure and most subjective to determine. So while it’s true that studios must commit to taking material seriously making sure everyone involved delivers the best film possible, it’s also true that everyone involved in Joker: Folie à Deux feels pretty certain they did exactly those things, and they felt they succeeded.

One recurring lesson I’ve seen across the past 20 years is that audience are less interested in deconstruction of superhero cinema outside of effectively established and recognizable popular iteration first. Because DC did more of the former in their films, it’s a lesson most visible in audience reception of DC movies.

Look at the well-received and financially successful DC films over the past 20 years — Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, Man of Steel, Suicide Squad, Wonder Woman, Aquaman, Joker, The Batman. Those films pretty much delivered (to varying degrees) the expected, recognized versions of superheroes, conforming mostly to audience preferences for those characters and/or superheroes in general.

So the lesson “make good movies” is really pointless beyond that. Even claiming “listen to what people prefer” suggests pandering and not taking risks, which isn’t the right lesson either.

But what is true, and what is a good lesson, is to understand the reasons audiences rejected the deconstructions, the reasons they felt uninterested or “cheated.”

And that’s part of the larger lesson at the heart of all of this: knowing your audience, knowing not only what they prefer and expect but also why they do, and knowing the characters and stories well enough to be able to deliver what audiences prefer and expect in interesting ways that still challenge the audience and even eventually subvert their expectations because you’ve earned it.

If you prove to audiences that you understand the characters and understand why the characters matter to them, you earn their permission to deconstruct the characters. And like it or not, you need viewer “permission” if you want audiences to buy in.

You also need to be sure you established which version you’re deconstructing. Because when the approach goes an extra layer deep by deconstructing an incarnation that is itself a deconstructed iteration of the character, then you’re asking audiences to take two big leaps of faith with you, beyond even the built-in leaps of faith you’re asking when you tell fantasy-sci-fi myths in the first place.

I love deconstruction. Mainstream audiences do, too. They just want to see it within the framework of something larger to care about on the front end, and particularly through a more recognizable version that they care about to begin with (or the deconstruction is pointless).

Whether it’s done across several films (the way Marvel Studios set up their shared universe before deconstructing it), or within a single but effective story (such as Zack Snyder’s Justice League did for Cyborg, or Barry Allen’s arc in The Flash), it usually needs to happen in some semblance of that format when you’re making movies about existing pop culture icons.

Marvel did it on the front end and largely avoided the problem of audience backlash. But Warner’s DCEU moved quickly into deconstructive territory, rooted in incarnations of certain characters that were already edge cases leaning toward deconstruction. Anyone’s personal opinion and preferences regarding the quality and value of that is beside the point, at this level of the discussion. It created a two-point barrier for audiences, and while it only initially slowed mainstream buy-in, it didn’t take long to turn audiences off entirely.

Financially, Man of Steel was a success at $668 million, despite slightly underperforming. Batman v Superman did blockbuster business with $874 million, but it underperformed as well and obviously quickly lost audience interest. Then, Suicide Squad did well to the tune of $749 million, and Wonder Woman was a huge hit that grossed $823 million. Justice League failed at $661 million, but Aquaman rebounded as the biggest hit of the DCEU with $1.1 billion.

Wonder Woman and Aquaman were widely accepted by audiences and critics alike, but the rest of those films — despite being generally financially successful — had mixed reviews and (mostly) so-so audience scores.

A new DC superhero shared world kicked off with the biggest and most popular versions of DC heroes, at a time when the MCU and the Nolan TDK trilogy put superhero cinema at the top of the charts, was always going to attract initial attention from audiences. But all of the signs of trouble were clear, and studio executive leadership’s hands-on approach not only didn’t help, it resulted in the franchise-killing Justice League fiasco.

I’ve already recounted the subsequent nine-film collapse, so I won’t repeat that. But what it reflected was audiences having decided the DCEU wasn’t what they wanted, and they were mostly done giving it more attention or money.

Now look closely at which of those early films did best, and which underperformed. The films that were generally what audiences expected and prefer in foundational superhero franchises were all successful — Man of Steel (mostly), Suicide Squad (theatrically, it delivered most of what the trailer reflected), Wonder Woman, and Aquaman.

Before them, it was the TDK trilogy and its moody faux-realism approach that reflected what’s always been most popular about Batman — the notion he’s got no powers, he’s just someone with resources who trained and wants to save his city. Batman Begins set up the Batman audiences love best and leaned into that. Then, in The Dark Knight, the series deconstructed Batman’s assumptions right in front of him, and then in The Dark Knight Rises they tore it all down and showed us its strengths and weaknesses before rebuilding it into something stronger in the end.

But the new DCEU only set up the idealized popular heroes in a few instances, while starting off with deconstruction when it came to some of the biggest and most important foundational characters and films.

The deconstructive elements in Man of Steel, and then the more pronounced deconstruction evident in Batman v Superman and Justice League, seem to have been a case of too much too soon for mainstream audiences.

The studio also felt that audiences knew these characters well enough not to need establishing them more popularly and positively, that deconstruction was possible out the gate. Which it is, and I liked and loved most of the early DCEU films, but being possible and liked by a portion of audience willing to bring their own awareness and preferences of the characters to the table is different from whether it’s a good idea that will be successful and embraced by the mainstream.

From there, those underlying disconnects from the audience mixed with soft critical reception and the unfortunate comparison to Marvel’s well-received sequels and new franchises. The comparison became all the more relevant at this particular point in time, because Marvel’s success was precisely because they were telling stories that mixed the overwhelmingly popular superhero origin template, with deconstructive elements arising later within the larger connected story elements.

After several years of the same sort of stories mostly signaling a lack of appreciation for what the viewers wanted, it seems audiences gave up giving DC a chance — with two exceptions, that is.

When a new Joker origin film appeared on the radar, audiences saw all of the signs that it was the sort of Joker we know the public prefers, presented in the sort of film audiences tend to favor for Batman and Batman-adjacent movies — namely, what Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight trilogy did. And what Joker did. And what The Batman did (and what The Penguin is currently doing).

Joker: Folie à Deux suffered because of early mixed to negative reactions at festival, from marketing that hid its musical nature while word of it being a musical spread anyway (thus creating buzz that the studio was hiding the musical nature because they feared audiences wouldn’t like it), and (mild spoiler) it winds up making many feel like they were cheated or that the film retroactively makes both films pointless.

It shouldn’t be hard to look at the films that succeeded, the ones that failed, and learn the right lessons. The only question now is, will audience show up?

My fear is that we are in a mirror of the same moment WB faced in 2013, with a new Superman movie launching a new shared universe, a solo Batman franchise that’s a rare bright spot after many rocky years for DC on film, changes in studio leadership, and a rising popular Marvel (again!) defining audience expectations for the genre going forward.

The final mirroring factor to consider is that we also just had a return of the 1990s cinematic Batman, in a film that was widely derided and failed at the box office (akin to Batman & Robin killing off the franchise in the 1990s).

There is a loud warning in all of this, and Batman is sort of the canary in the coal mine. It’s not that Batman is a “tainted brand,” it’s that the DC brand has become so tainted that with the failure of The Flash last year and Joker: Folie à Deux this year, for the first time since the 1990s Batman isn’t able to draw built-in audience trust and interest. Joker’s own box office draw has been firmly established since 1989, with even Jared Leto’s oft-criticized Joker enjoying great financial success in his one-film appearance.

Is the Batman brand no longer safe? Will audience distrust of the DC brand carry over in coming years to even otherwise good or great Batman projects? If Joker’s sequel to a billion dollar origin story can’t generate enough audience interest and trust to at least have a decent opening weekend, should we be concerned about the future of Batman movies, solo or in the DCU?

I’d like to think audiences will reward The Batman - Part II with another huge box office cume, and that as long as WBD and DC Studios don’t meddle or cancel it, the Matt Reeves Batman world could be immune to the other pressures working against DC’s shared world stuff. Perhaps the DCU’s upcoming new Batman and Robin movie has something to worry about, but surely not the newly established solo Batman?

Sadly, the fact is I also thought Joker’s success and its proximity to Batman — especially as a “grounded and gritty” continuation — was a safe bet. But audiences have told us loud and clear — there are no safe bets anymore.