Five years ago, Warner Bros. and Todd Phillips’ “Joker” achieved a number of firsts, including becoming the first comic book film to win the Golden Lion and Best Actor Oscar, as well as the first R-rated film to win a dollar grossed billions at the global box office.

Joker: Folie à Deux won’t hit the $1 billion mark, but there’s still a chance the sequel will be a hit film for Warner – if fans of the original embrace the musical numbers featured in Arthur Fleck’s fractured Play head. Warner Bros. is predicting an opening weekend in the $50 million range, putting it close to the $55 million grossed by last year’s big DC flop “The Flash.”

Like the first film, reviews for “Folie à Deux” have been mixed, currently sitting at 56% on Rotten Tomatoes. In 2019, those reviews meant little to audiences who were stunned by Joaquin Phoenix’s Oscar-winning performance as a failed, mentally ill comedian pushed to his limits by the cruelty of Gotham City, transforming him into the Clown Prince of Crime Batman’s greatest opponent.

However, pre-release projections suggest that a significant portion of moviegoers are either not interested in the changed structure of Folie à Deux or are simply not interested in more of Phoenix’s Joker, even with the addition of Lady Gaga as Lee , Phillips’ take on Joker’s right-hand man, Harley Quinn.

The projected opening of $50 million would be about half of the $96 million that “Joker” brought in in 2019, setting a still-standing record for the highest opening weekend ever in October.

While Joker had a budget of $60 million, some reports put a production budget of $200 million for Folie à Deux. Phillips has refuted that figure in interviews, although he has said that it cost significantly more to produce this film, which he and Warner are not calling a sequel but rather a new story that uses Joker as a framework for Lee’s own character arc.

As part of this story arc, Joker and Lee take part in several dream music sequences throughout the film, something that was discussed frequently by Phillips, Gaga and Phoenix during their press tour but is somewhat downplayed in the film’s trailers. While not to the same extent as trailers for other recent musical films such as Mean Girls, whose musical numbers were not promoted at all in the marketing, “Folie à Deux” focuses more on the budding relationship between Arthur and Lee in Arkham Asylum. As TheWrap pointed out earlier this year, Hollywood has avoided marketing musicals as musicals because the genre carries greater financial risks.

Another DC misfire?

With a budget only slightly less than the CGI-heavy DC spectacles from which “Joker” departed, “Folie à Deux” is headed for a similar fate to the superhero misfires that Warner Bros. pre-James Gunns made last year Franchise reboot released in 2025? Even the best-performing of those 2023 films, “Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom,” had to wait over the holidays to break even with $439 million worldwide, less than half of the $1.15 billion that which the first “Aquaman” recorded.

As with many films, it will become clearer after the second weekend how well “Joker 2” will perform. The Flash’s $55 million opening was a disappointment given the hype behind it, but it was the brutal 72% drop in its second weekend that sealed its fate. Exhibitor sources indicate that overseas tracking is stronger for “Joker 2” than for “The Flash,” which could help soften the blow if the film can’t get a domestic release.

With loyal fans of “Joker” and Lady Gaga showing up next to each other on opening weekend, “Joker 2” will need enough traction to remain the main moneymaker for theaters in October. If not, that could leave the door open for upcoming sequels like Paramount’s “Smile 2” and Sony’s “Venom: The Last Dance” to lure moviegoers looking for darker mainstream delights.

In 2019, there were questions about how exactly an R-rated DC drama would play in theaters. Adult-oriented superhero films had already worked with the Deadpool films, but these were marketed as comedies rather than one man’s tragic descent into a violent icon of a decaying society. If the film had only grossed $500 million worldwide, it would have been a success.

But with a budget that was about a third of that of its DC brethren, Joker exceeded all expectations and became a cultural phenomenon. Through a mix of an acclaimed actor playing the most famous comic book villain of all time, the hype surrounding its premiere at the Venice Film Festival, and the cultural chatter about the film’s potential to incite real-life violence, “Joker” achieved which doesn’t have an R rating. Another film had done this before: it joined the $1 billion club and became the highest-grossing film of 2019 that wasn’t released or produced by Disney.

Now, it’s entirely possible that Joker: Folie à Deux will just perform like a standard October, despite the studio giving Phillips a huge budget for his cinematic vision and higher expectations for the return of an actor-character pair , which has become an iconic wide release, opens with around $110 million worldwide and ends with a worldwide total between $400 and $600 million.

This is an outcome that cinemas will embrace. And while it doesn’t provide significant relief for parent company Warner Bros. Discovery as it weathers the financial turmoil exacerbated by the decline of linear television and the domestic success of “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice,” it could ease Warner Bros.’s bid Bridge The picture department hopes to hit the ground running in 2025 with a slate of writers including Bong Joon-ho, Paul Thomas Anderson and Ryan Coogler. The centerpiece will be a Superman movie that Warner hopes can lead DC to a brighter future.

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