The numbers I received this morning for “Joker: Folie à Deux” are not good. The latest update is that it made around $6.5M in Thursday previews, which sets it up for a $45M-$50M weekend. By the way, if you want a good sense of the film’s overall vibe, just take a look at this first clip of one of the musical sequences in the film.
How on earth did this film cost $190M? Puck’s Matt Belloni is reporting that Joaquin Phoenix, Lady Gaga and Todd Phillips alone made up around $50M of the budget. The costs-benefit analysis isn’t good, especially for a film that’s now at a paltry 39% on Rotten Tomatoes.
Meanwhile, I had a free ticket to watch the film again last night, and the whole thing feels misguided. Sure, the ambition is honorable, but the execution is clunky. Almost nothing gels in this film, Lady Gaga is miscast, Joaquin Phoenix stumbles and the story beats are ludicrous.
Audiences don’t seem to like ‘Folie à Deux’ either; it received 1/2 star from PostTrak, has a 37% RT user rating and a score of 5.4/10 on IMDb. Warner Bros must be scratching their heads as to how they could have possibly greenlit such a misguided project, and with no apparent oversight on the whole thing. Belloni says that they didn’t even bother to test screen the film to gauge feedback.