‘A middle finger to the audience’: Why Joker 2 flopped

How a $200 million musical sequel made by a director intent on punishing fans of the original became a box office folly for the ages

Warning: contains spoilers
The new Joker movie has an unfortunate punchline for Warner Bros Pictures. Despite the star presence of Joaquin Phoenix and Lady Gaga and the huge fanbase spawned by Todd Phillips’s original 2019 Joker, sequel Joker: Folie à Deux is proving a flop for the ages, earning a paltry £29 million in its US opening weekend – less than a third of the showing of its predecessor. 
Factoring in a budget estimated at over £150 million and Folie à Deux isn’t a blip – it’s a disaster. But it isn’t just a commercial disappointment. Critics hate it, too. “A come-down that essentially punishes [fans] for enjoying the volatile energy of the first film,” said Time. “Half-baked, halfhearted,” agreed the New York Times. 
The genuine vitriol, however, is from punters who have stumped up to watch the 138-minute disaster, which features many dreary duets between Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck (the Joker) and Gaga’s Harleen Quintzel, aka his comic book sidekick Harley Quinn.
“This was the movie I waited for 5 years? Where the f is the story?” fumed one audience member on IMDB. “What’s the point of making the movie? Good job for making it a musical you made it look like a cartoon movie I just wasted a $20 ticket.” 
Others found Folie à Deux hugely annoying. They were struck by the baffling decision to turn the Joker’s story into a courtroom drama, where, via song, he revisites the events that had put him behind bars in the first place. 
“I’m so irritated. Joker was a gritty, intense psychological thriller that explored complex themes of mental illness and societal breakdown. It was a raw, dark film that didn’t need gimmicks or unnecessary changes to make a statement. So WHY in the world would anyone think it’s a good idea to turn Joker 2 into a musical?” There are reports of cinemagoers walking out after the songs.
Fuelled by Phoenix’s chilling performance as the deranged Fleck and by Phillips’s stylish repackaging of the Seventies nihilism of Martin Scorsese’s King of Comedy and Taxi Driver, 2019’s Joker felt like the opening of a new chapter of superhero cinema. It was a superhero movie that existed in opposition to the shiny, shallow optimism of the then-ascendant Marvel Universe. A kick in the shins rather than a quip and a smile.
Yet it was as divisive as it was boundary-breaking. Naysayers decried Joker as stoking the fantasies of “incel” fanboys who, it was feared, would go too far in identifying with the Arthur’s violent social awkwardness. 
At the time, Phillips pushed back against such claims, saying that if isolated young men were a threat to society, it was better to face up to that and explore it rather than pretend the problem didn’t exist. He didn’t see the Joker as glorifying incel culture as much as highlighting it as an issue that needed to be acknowledged. 
“Isn’t it good to have these discussions about violence? Why is that a bad thing if the movie does lead to a discourse about it?” he said – in response to the argument that Joker glamorised misogyny (Time Magazine, for instance, said, “Arthur is a mess, but we’re also supposed to think he’s kind of great, a misunderstood savant.”)
Whatever their personal feelings about Joker, nobody would dispute that it struck a chord. In the end, it earned more than $1 billion at the box office – one of the biggest hauls ever for a superhero feature. Surely, pulling off that feat a second time would not be beyond Phillips’s abilities? After all, the sequels to The Hangover have grossed millions (even as they have grossed out critics). Instead, Folie à Deux has driven the “franchise” – if these Batman spin-offs can be thought of as such –off a cliff. What went wrong? 
The first misstep was to make it a musical. Hollywood has been burned by the genre recently – recall the disaster that was the 2020 adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats – a catastrophe of such proportions that it took a once-in-a-century pandemic to erase our memories of it. “The failure of Joker: Folie à Deux is as clear as an azure sky of deepest summer: No fan of the original movie wanted to see a musical sequel, Mr. Phillips. Period,” wrote Deadline this week.
White men liked the first Joker movie, so they had to make the second one as bad as possible out of spite.The plot twist is Joker 2 has brought all races together in their shared hatred of the film. pic.twitter.com/XcDU5P0PN2
It isn’t even a true musical. Initially, Warner Bros had made a great song and dance about that brave new direction, heralding the casting of Lady Gaga as Harley. But then, in the run-up to the release, Phillips had sounded a different note, suggesting Joker 2 was not, in fact, a musical. “Most of the music in the movie is really just dialogue.”
He’s right after a fashion. Folie à Deux is a musical that is desperately embarrassed about it (presumably why the “m” word is never once mentioned in the marketing campaign). There are some large-scale song and dance numbers. For the most part, however, the “singing” is Phoenix and Gaga trading whispers. “The result is a movie that’s neither a serious, austere drama nor a full-blown song-and-dance movie,” said ScreenCrush.
Phillips also seems to have gone out of his way to punish anyone who appreciated Joker 1.0. In that Joker, Fleck was a misunderstood anti-hero – mentally unstable but also ill-treated by a world that had no time for anyone who failed to live up to mainstream idea of modern masculinity. 
In part two, the director pulls the rug away and insists Fleck is a delusional freak. He punishes him by having prisoners gang rape the character during his trial – and then, finally, reveals he isn’t even the real Joker. The action ends with Fleck stabbed to death by another prisoner who is shown to be the actual mega-villain. Phillips is reaching back in time to ruin fans’ enjoyment of the 2019 original. 
Folie à Deux is, in other words, a highly meta arthouse movie that is in uncomfortable dialogue with the original – as one review put it, it’s effectively a “a middle-finger to the audience”. That’s fine – there is space in the comic book world for avant-garde filmmaking that challenges and assumptions. But not every highly meta arthouse movie comes with a £150 million price tag – of which at least £30 million is believed to consist of the paycheques of the director and the two leads. Phillips is ready to go out on the limb – but not at the price of his big payday. 
That arrogance extended to the decision not to hold test screenings – where the audience would presumably have made their views plain – and to premiere at the Venice Film Festival, where negative reviews stank up the air weeks before Folie à Deux was finally released. 
Nor did Phillips make any effort to keep overheads in check. He reported insisted on shooting in New York – far more expensive than a stand-in such as Toronto or Atlanta. Why was he given such latitude? How was it that nobody at Warner shouted stop? One theory is that his Hangover trilogy and that first Joker had earned so much for the studio that it was felt that he should be given licence to make the film he wanted – regardless of its lack of commercial potential. 
Folie à Deux represents the end of an era – not just for Phillips (who said he will not return to the Batman franchise) but for the DC Movie universe, which is being rebooted under James Gunn, who had no role in the already green-lit Joker 2. In that context, it feels almost like a mic drop from Phillips. 
At one point, Arthur says to Harley: “I don’t think we’re giving the people what they want.” That seems to have been the entire point of Folie à Deux. It’s an extravagant joke at the expense of comic book fandom, though you wonder if anyone at Warner Bros. is laughing now that Phillips and his collaborators have skipped giggling into the sunset, clutching their vast paycheques tightly as they go.  
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