Joker Folie à Deux has a disastrous opening

Joker: Folie à Deux has opened disastrously, with the opening weekend not even cracking $40 million despite the massive budget.

Despite being a sequel to a movie that made a billion dollars worldwide, Joker: Folie à Deux has posted a truly disastrous opening. According to Deadline, the film didn’t even crack $40 million this weekend, with them estimating a horrible $39 million finish. That’s over $20 million less than we expected in our box office predictions, which is crazy as just a few months ago, no one would have thought it conceivable that the film would open to anything less than $90 or so million. The $39 million opening is even worse than the $55 million opening posted by The Flash, and The Marvels, which opened with $46 million. Both openings were considered disastrous, and Joker: Folie à Deux looks like it might not even cross $100 million domestically.

So what happened? It seems fans didn’t go for Todd Phillips’s rather ambitious idea to make this a musical, with it peppered with fantasy musical sequences in between some rather dull courtroom melodrama. The star pairing of Joaquin Phoenix and Lady Gaga wasn’t enough to win over fanboys or general audiences, who slammed it with an almost unheard of (for a comic book movie) D CinemaScore rating. With word of mouth like this, expect this Joker film to quickly crash and burn at the box office over the coming weeks.

Meanwhile, The Wild Robot held up quite well this week, making $18.7 million, a fall of just 46%, for a $63.9 million total. While it’s not going to be a huge blockbuster as far as animated movies go, expect it to have strong legs in the weeks ahead thanks to its terrific reviews (including a rave from our own Steve Seigh). Beetlejuice Beetlejuice also held firm at the box office, with it dipping 36% to $10.3 million and a massive $265.5 million total, which is a much-needed win for WB, who are no doubt reeling from Furiosa, Horizon, and Joker 2 all flopping.

Sadly, Paramount’s very decent Transformers One continued to struggle to find an audience despite good word of mouth. It only made $5.35 million this weekend, with a $47 million total. Blumhouse’s Speak No Evil continued to pull in solid numbers, with a $2.8 million fifth-place finish and a $32 million domestic total.

In a surprising move, YouTube stars Sam & Colby managed to eke out a sixth-place finish for their film, Sam & Colby: The Legends of Paranormal, which made $1.77 million, for a $2 million total. With more YouTubers expanding their reach, expect more movies like this to start showing up in the top 10. In seventh place was Deadpool & Wolverine, which made $1.55 million for a $633.8 million total, with it also showing up on digital this week (Disney made a wise move holding it for so long). Lionsgate had yet another flop this weekend, with their Wonder prequel, White Bird, having an abysmal $1.5 million opening. Mubi’s The Substance has proven to be a solid art-house horror hit, with the $1.4 million weekend almost allowing it to crack the $10 million mark. Finally, Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis lost a whopping 73% of its audience to earn just over $1 million this weekend for a terrible $6.45 million total.

Next weekend seems like it will be disappointing, as it’s fairly light on new releases, and Hollywood no doubt thought Joker 2 would be packing them in. There likely won’t be any real fireworks until Smile 2 opens in two weeks.

Did you go see Joker 2 this weekend? Let us know in the comments!