The Collapse of Joker 2's Box Office Prospects: Do We Have Another The Flash On Our Hands?

I have, I think, been less bullish on Joker 2 than others since I started following the news about it. While acknowledging the colossal success of the original and the factors that may make a follow-up similarly successful (indeed, last year the film seemed to me the year's best chance for a billion-dollar hit), I have also remarked again and again all it had going against it. Not the least of this was the extent to which the first film was a beneficiary of a rare moral panic-fed barrage of hype, and it increasingly seems, a bait-and-switch selling the story of Arthur Fleck as a Joker origin story--neither of which will be as helpful this time, all as the media may not be terribly friendly (a lot of the opinion-makers feared and hated the film and may be looking for revenge this time around), while there is an undeniable gamble in making what looks less like Joker 2 than Arthur Fleck II: The Musical (All talking! All singing!), with the precedent of Joker producer Martin Scorsese's following up Taxi Driver with New York, New York inauspicious. Indeed, if I saw the first Boxoffice Pro forecast for the film's opening ($115-$145 million) as portending the film's possibly matching its predecessor, I wrote that

the question now is which way the interest will go in the next month--whether we will see it collapse, hold steady or even surge, and then after that, just how audiences will respond to the movie when they do see it.

The following week, alas, we saw the range collapse, from $115-$145 million to just $60-$100 million, and then $60-$90 million the week after that. And things got worse still over the following two weeks, with the just published forecast of the week of release presenting a range of just $50-$60 million for the opening weekend.

About 40 percent of what the forecasters expected a mere month earlier, this is a faster, farther drop to a lower point than was even seen with The Flash, for which the same publication anticipated a very similar $115-$140 million initially, and then watched the prediction decline to $72-$105 million by the last, long-range, forecast, all as the forecast from the Wednesday before opening day predicted, at worst, $69 million.

Of course, a movie may disappoint on opening weekend and be rescued by "good legs," and/or the international market, but the opposite seems more likely to be the case when there is such a trend. Certainly it didn't happen for The Flash. That movie opened to $55 million, and did not quite manage to double that domestically (finishing out at $108 million), while if it did a bit better overseas this was only in the sense that there was a relatively decent foreign take relative to the domestic one, which worked out to a global total of $271 million. The result was almost certainly a nine figure loss for the studio, and possibly the biggest flop of the year (my math indicating at least the possibility that The Flash and not the even lower-grossing, couldn't-make-it-to-the-$100-million-mark-in-North-America Captain Marvel 2 registered the biggest net loss for its backer).

In the worst-case scenario Joker 2 seems to me now in danger of making no more than The Flash did, all while having a $200 million production budget (triple the original Joker's, and approximately what The Flash was at least initially reported as running its backers). The result is that this movie, which such a short while ago looked as if it could be one of the saviors of the weak 2024 box office, could instead serve as yet another reminder that even if they can still score big (as the dynamic duo of Deadpool and Wolverine did this past summer) big sequels like this one are less reliable performers than they used to be in today's shrunken North American and global film market, as it not only makes its way onto Deadline's list of the biggest flops next year, but very possibly goes to the very top of that list. Possibly, I say, because it may yet have some competition for the dubious honor of that list's #1 spot given the number of high-risk big releases due out this fall in the present, rather finite, market (not least Gladiator 2, the first forecasts for which we may start to hear about very soon).