Joker: Folie à Deux Drops 81% In Second Weekend At The U.S. Box Office

Before the month of October, if anyone had predicted that Joker: Folie à Deux would fall from No. 1 after only a single weekend to another killer clown movie then it would have been easy to dismiss. And yet that’s exactly what happened as Terrifier 3 is the new U.S. box-office champion with $18.3 million (via Deadline) in its opening weekend. As for the Joker sequel, it fell to third place behind The Wild Robot’s $13.45 million, which brings the DreamWorks Animation film to $83.7 million to date.

There were warning signs about Folie à Deux’s box office prospects before it opened to a disappointing $37.7 million, which was far behind the $96.2 million that Joker had in its opening weekend in 2019. For its second weekend, Joker: Folie à Deux fell 81% to only $7.055 million. To put this in perspective, that’s the biggest drop for a DC superhero-inspired film. There are only two DC movies that put up worse numbers in their second weekends: Wonder Woman 1984 with $5.4 million in 2020–when theaters were still largely closed due to the pandemic–and Jonah Hex, which only had $1.6 million during its second weekend in 2010.

The news doesn’t get much better for Folie à Deux when the international numbers are factored in. As reported by Deadline, Joker: Folie à Deux only added $22.7 million from 77 other countries this past weekend, bringing its international total to $113.7 million. When Joker 2’s domestic total, $51.6 million, is factored in, its worldwide total is $165.3 million against a $200 million budget, which doesn’t count the large advertising campaign for the film. Another thing to keep in mind is that studios typically only keep half of what their movies make in theaters, with the rest going to the theater-owners. So this sequel likely has no shot at becoming profitable, and it stands to lose a significant amount of money for the studio.

Warner Bros. does have one bit of good news to celebrate. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice finished in fourth place just behind Folie à Deux by adding $7.05 million to its $275.6 million domestic take. That’s by far the biggest hit of the fall movie season to date. It just won’t be enough to offset the losses from Joker 2. At the rate that Folie à Deux is falling, it may even be out of the top 10 by its fourth weekend of release. In the meantime, the Joker sequel should land somewhere in the bottom half of the top 10 next weekend.