Joker 2 | Here comes the fallout, as blame game begins (original) (raw)
The box office returns for Joker 2 – Joker: Folie A Deux – have come in short, and already, blame appears to be apportioned. A few thoughts.
The box office performance of Joker 2, or Joker: Folie A Deux to its friends, is hardly on the catastrophic side, but it’s also very clearly a sizeable disappointment for Warner Bros.
The original film was made for a modest sum of around 60mandwentontogrossover60m and went on to gross over 60mandwentontogrossover1bn. The sequel has cost more than three times the original to make, and looks set to top out at around 400monceitsboxofficeruniscomplete.TheopeningweekendintheUSofsome400m once its box office run is complete. The opening weekend in the US of some 400monceitsboxofficeruniscomplete.TheopeningweekendintheUSofsome37m came in below expectations, even if international box office held up okay.
Still, some are calling it a ‘box office bomb’, even if that seems on the dramatic side.
What is clear is that Warner Bros will have wanted and expected a lot more from its expensive sequel.
Already, therefore, the blame game is underway, and the spinning bottle has stopped at director Todd Phillips. Variety has dug into the goings on behind the scenes of the film, and is reporting that Phillips had basically bought himself a sizeable amount of power after the first movie, and is suggesting that he used it.
The key part of that story is the red lines that Todd Phillips is alleged to have had to the studio. Warner Bros’ DC films and TV shows are now under the watchful eye of James Gunn and Peter Safran, the pair drafted in back in October 2022 as co-chairmen and CEO of DC Studios. The subhead of the press announcement, as you can read here, declares that the two “will be responsible for the overall creative direction of the storied superhero franchise across film, TV, and animation under new unified banner”.
That may not be the case here, though.
The thing is, they also inherited projects that were already moving before they assumed their new positions. Arguably the highest profile initially was The Flash movie, but also there was Shazam: Fury Of The Gods, Blue Beetle and Aquaman And The Lost Kingdom. In each case, Gunn and Safran made the right supportive noises, knowing that their imprint on the DC franchise was only just beginning. In fact, Gunn has spent much of his time since October 2022 writing and directing 2025’s new Superman movie (as well as working on the Peacemaker TV show).
Furthermore, it’s worth noting that two films effectively exist outside of Gunn and Safran’s DC ecosystem, a pair of films that became all but certain following the success of their forerunners. Matt Reeves is embarking therefore on The Batman – Part II, and then there’s Joker: Folie A Deux.
Tellingly, Joker 2 doesn’t actually open up with the DC logo at the front (although it does appear at the other end of the movie), something Warner Bros has downplayed, but fans had certainly noticed.
What Variety suggests is that Todd Phillips wouldn’t go through James Gunn and Peter Safran, and instead went straight to the heads of the motion picture group. Those heads? Michael de Luca and Pamela Abdy, who themselves have only been in post since the summer of 2022.
The first big budget movie that de Luca and Abdy gave the greenlight to? That looks like Joker: Folie A Deux, which was filming by December of that year. Notably, at a point when each of de Luca, Abdy, Safran and Gunn were in their new offices. Yet it seems – and Todd Phillips hasn’t commented on this – that he was only taking notes and feedback from the former. Unlike Matt Reeves, who seems to have a good relationship with the new DC hierarchy, Phillips was said to be treating this more of a Warner Bros movie than a DC film. For better or worse, the final film reflects that.
Phillips originally jumped away from making the R-rated comedies he built his fame on, as he told Vanity Fair, in part out of frustration at “woke culture”, to my memory the first filmmaker to invoke the word in an interview.
To put his comments into fairer context, he argued that people were gingerly stepping around comedy for fear of offending people. “So I go, ‘How do I do something irreverent, but fuck comedy? Oh I know, let’s take the comic book movie universe and turn it on its head with this.’ And so that’s really where that came from”, he explained.
He’s, it’s thus worth acknowledging, not come to the Joker films out of a reverence of fandom for the source material, and the first time around, that worked out well. The second time around, it’s been noted that his film couldn’t be less interested in Joker fandom, and that’s one reason why it’s believed that the US box office numbers have fallen as they have.
Going back to Variety, it details what it suggests is friction behind the scenes, although again, that’s hardly unusual on a major blockbuster. But what also comes across is the more unusual amount of control that Phillips had over the film and its production. One anecdote talks of him resisting a request from Warner Bros Discovery boss to film the movie in London, which would have brought the budget down notably. Phillips, the man who’d directed a $60m film that grossed a billion, wanted Los Angeles and got it. Warner Bros footed the bill without grumbling.
Interestingly too, it’s not just that he didn’t have to go through James Gunn and Peter Safran with his movie, it turns out that Joker: Folie A Deux didn’t even have to go through the traditional studio test screening process. Again, to put some context with this, when Martin Scorsese made films for the studio, such as Goodfellas and The Departed, much to Scorsese’s frustration, they both had to be test screened. In the case of Phillips, the first time his film saw a full, independent audience appeared to be when it debuted at the Venice Film Festival.
Of course, Venice was the venue for the original film’s triumphant launch, which built word of mouth that something special was coming. The launch at Venice this time around had the opposite effect, and once the reviews came back on the unenthusiastic side, Warner Bros’ marketing team was on the back foot. Had the movie not debuted at Venice this time around, and word of mouth had less time to spread, that box office opening might have been a whole lot stronger (the confusion over whether to lean into the film’s musical elements in its promotion didn’t help either).
But also: who really knows? Somehow, a pretty singular vision has got through the studio system, admittedly at great expense. Something that managed to get through the usual studio checking system, for better or worse. Yet the aftermath of _Joker: Folie A Deux_’s box office means that the next person who tries to bypass the DC Studios team on a film like this is set to get short shrift.
And for Warner Bros, there’s a broader problem in that it’s again failed to convert a billion dollar DC hit into an ongoing franchise. _Aquaman_’s sequel came in at $439m worldwide, less than half of that of the original. Joker: Folie A Deux will do well to top that.
Who’s to blame? Well, finger pointing is inevitably now rife. Is it Todd Phillips, who seemingly got way more control that others directors would have expected? The studio heads who reduced the checking on the film? The pushing back in the movie itself against the core fanbase who championed the first?
Todd Phillips is the current target, and that may well be fair. Given he’d already ruled out Joker 3, and that Joaquin Phoenix is going to get harder and harder to insure following his late decision to pull out of Todd Haynes’ new film earlier this year, it’s all a bit moot now.
The ultimate person who may end up carrying the can is any future filmmaker who might want to get something off-kilter through the studio system. Because now, there’s an executive out there who’ll look at the Joker sequel numbers and go: y’know what, we’d best play safe. They may not be the ones to blame, but they’re the ones who are going to be affected…
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