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Joker 2 will go down in comic book movie history as one of its biggest – and most surprising – flops.
With the original having grossed over $1 billion dollars at the box office, Joaquin Phoenix's Clown Prince of Crime returned for a sequel that sidestepped much of the angsty grittiness that proved so popular and, in its place, turned into a prison-set musical starring Lady Gaga that rejected the very notion of the Joker persona.
After grossing $207 million from a reported $200 million budget, it's fair to say the experiment was a failure – at least among audiences.
However, Warner Bros. co-film heads Pamela Abdy and Michael de Luca are far more magnanimous in the period since its release.
"I really liked the movie, I still do," Abdy told The Wrap.
De Luca even offered up a reason as to why Joker: Folie à Deux didn't put smiles on people's faces.
"It was really revisionist. It may be that it was too revisionist for a global mainstream audience, but I thought that Todd and his screenwriting partner Scott [Silver] did the thing that most people making sequels don’t do, which is they decided to not repeat themselves," De Luca said. "I do give them immense props for not repeating themselves, but it just turned out to not connect with the audience."
In the words of Joker himself, perhaps: you wouldn't get it.
The Joker 2 ending stood out as being a particularly brutal deconstruction of the iteration of a character that had become a pop culture icon since the 2019 release of the original Todd Phillips-directed movie. Mean-spirited? Maybe. But it can't be argued that it did things differently.
For more on what DC characters are coming to the big screen, check out our guides on upcoming DC movies and DCU Chapter One: Gods and Monsters.
