As a follow-up sequel to an edgy clown movie ranked #1 at the box office the weekend of October 12th, it wasn’t the second weekend of Joker: Folie a Deux that sealed the deal, in fact, that film ranked third among possible options fitting of the description after bombing in its first week. If you add in the caveat of ‘includes a musical number from its main character’ it would’ve still ranked second behind a sequel to a movie from nearly 40 years ago that had been out since the first week of September.
Joker: Folie à Deux, the much-anticipated sequel to the 2019 Joker, was released in theaters on October 4, 2024. Directed by Todd Phillips, it stars Joaquin Phoenix reprising his role as Arthur Fleck (the Joker) alongside Lady Gaga as Harley Quinn. The film builds on the original’s dark themes with a unique musical twist…
Warner Bros mishandling of Joker Folie a Deux, including the drastic tonal shift from the original, wasn’t the only thing that jeopardized Joker Folie a Deux at the box office. A variety of problems plagued the sequel: the recent controversy surrounding lead star Joaquin Phoenix, its bad word-of-mouth coming out of festivals, comic book IP fatigued being at an all-time high despite the roaring success of Marvel’s Deadpool & Wolverine earlier in the summer, and the fact that its budget was four times the amount of the original, ultimately dooming profitability from the onset. On top of all of this, the movie isn’t necessarily as bad as it’s been made out to be from a stand-alone purview, but it failed to understand what made the original so special, cannibalizing itself by committing the ultimate box office sin: an incoherent perception of who the film is for. Perhaps, even with an abundance of other issues, it also didn’t help that director Todd Phillips is attempting to ride the success of the original film to re-shape his image as an auteur, despite primarily being known as an otherwise exclusive low-brow comedy guru, a la Old School or The Hangover trilogy.
Regardless of the why or the how, Joker: Folie a Deux has joined Furiosa, The Crow, Transformers One, Madame Web, among other franchises as some of 2024’s largest box office flops. This comes only a year after flops such as The Flash, Indiana Jones and The Dial of Destiny, Haunted Mansion, and The Marvels. However, the idea that people are tired of sequels doesn’t necessarily ring true, as two of the top three box office success stories currently are sequels, while proven IP films such as Dune 2, Twisters, A Quiet Place: Day One, Bad Boys: Ride or Die, Godzilla x Kong: New Empire, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, and Alien: Romulus represent some of the biggest success stories of the year. Tentpole films are tentpoles because they make money, and there within lays the problem: the tentpole films do make money. In 2023, The Flash and the Marvels brought in more than $200M at the box office, while Harrison Ford’s final portrayal of his most iconic role garnered $384M at the box office. In 2024, films such as Furiosa and Joker: Folie a Deux made more than most movies will make this year, yet the profitability margin is in the toilet. It’s not that these movies aren’t hits financially with audiences, it’s that they don’t make enough to recoup the money they’re spending.
Take The Rock for example. Dwayne Johnson is considered one of the biggest stars in Hollywood, transforming from The Brahma Bull into the quintessential popcorn-flick action star of a generation over the last 20 or so years. Yet, judging by Hollywood’s 2.5x profitability adage, his movies haven’t made money in half a decade. His upcoming Christmas movie Red One projects a minimum $625M breakeven-point due to its $250M budget, plus its marketing and exhibition costs. This movie is a run-of-the-mill family Christmas movie that fifteen years ago would’ve been made on, at most, a $25M budget with practical effects, made $100M at the box office, and been considered a moderate success for a budding superstar in Johnson. Yet, between the excessive CGI use that’s already garnering criticism, Johnson’s reported on-set professionalism issues delaying production, and Johnson’s ridiculous salary, the movie is already spending more than it has any chance of making as your basic kid-friendly Christmas film that will end up being remarkably similar to something you can find on four different streaming services this holiday season for free. No matter how big a star Dwayne Johnson is, there is zero way this film is set to make money and he’s looking at a continuation of the trend where every single movie he’s the lead in this decade loses the studio money, becoming arguably the most unreliable ‘superstar’ at the box office in the world. A movie that’s about to slide in nicely between The Game Plan and The Tooth Fairy in Johnson’s filmography has no business costing as much as it does.
I use Red One as an upcoming example as it extrapolates the primary reason the big budget movies are seen as a failure at a high-level. With marketing, the costs of trailer spots, physical merchandising, website optimization, billboards, TV spots, promotional crossovers, and dozens of other marketing avenues alongside the salaries of the people that deliver on film marketing requires its own budget that isn’t factored into the budget of a big-budget blockbuster, and ordinarily, studios allocate approximately the same amount as it does the budget of the motion picture. There are also directions films need to go to the reach a broader audience. For example, the average person may not care for a family-friendly Christmas movie, but if they were to see the stars on a show such as Stephen Colbert or Saturday Night Live, theoretically they’d walk up to the box office and ask for a ticket for ‘that Dwayne Johnson movie.’
As sequels continue to drop in exhibition, Joker: Folie a Deux may have flopped, but Terrifier 3 opened to a $27M week, while Smile 2 earned $46M in its opening weekend following a strong $2.5M offering in Thursday previews. With viewers flocking to enjoy the popcorn at the clown cafe, Terrifier 3 is a massive sensation due to its $2M budget. Smile 2 has a much more sizable budget, clocking in at $28M, but with its opening weekend numbers and what seems to be strong word-of-mouth on the way, recouping the money for Paramount is seemingly an inevitability. Furthermore, recent hits this year include The Substance, Demi Moore’s body-horrifying resurgence vehicle that has already become Mubi’s highest-grossing film of all-time, Shudder’s biggest film to date in the Carson-esq horror Late Night With The Devil, and NEON’s massive box office smash Longlegs. A24’s Maxxxine may have been the worst-received movie of the Goth trilogy, yet after turning a profit with both X and Pearl in 2022 on a $2M budget, A24 greenlit a larger budget for the third installment and was rewarded with the highest grossing film of the group. All of these movies have a handful of specific things in common, primarily genre, but their budget and marketing force the movies to become more creative. Films such as the Terrifier movies and Longlegs required the word-of-mouth for most gratuitous slasher and most haunting movie of the century respectively, whether they delivered on those promises or not.
Terrifier 3 became the highest box office attraction in the history of unrated movies. It’s outgrossed its entire franchise and made 20x its budget. While it won’t make as much as an Oppenheimer or Avatar: Way of the Water, that doesn’t keep it from being one of the biggest hits of the decade thus far due to its profitability ratio. Its small budget is remarkable, but its marketing budget comes in even smaller at only $500,000, pennies for a marketing campaign. The campaign simply consisted of two trailers, a teaser, but a very active social media scene that fixated on viral awareness. Of course, the Terrifier franchise was originally a direct-to-video horror movie to fill content on a streaming service before going viral due to its craftsmanship and launching a theatrical franchise, so perhaps they’ve always been ahead of the curve. The allure of an unrated movie promising to be the most gratuitously violent slasher movie of all-time likely has a lot to do with its success as well, but horror movies as a whole being cheap to produce with a built-in audience places the genre among Hollywood’s most reliable projects on a year-to-year basis.
Ultimately, the epidemic plaguing the box-office isn’t that people don’t want to go see franchise films, it’s that the budgets that accompany them have ballooned. Ridley Scott’s Gladiator II later this year is projected to be a hit, generate Academy buzz for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor (Paul Mescal), and Best Supporting Actor (1999 and 2002 Academy Award Winner Denzel Washington). Yet, with its $300M budget it needs to double the box office of the original Russell Crowe film from 25 years ago for Paramount. Historically speaking, a studio like Paramount would release more films the level of Smile 2 to generate money to fund the tentpole films such as Gladiator II in hopes that one of the larger budget films can become a billion dollar classic that drives home video sales through the roof. Nowadays, the disruption caused by Netflix ten years ago has changed the profitable business-model studios had been running on for approximately 90 years. With Netflix driving budgets through the roof, the disruptor is run more as a technology company than a movie studio with a majority of its funding coming through Wall Street. The business model requires quarterly growth driven by interest in their product, not necessarily profit margins. While they don’t’ necessarily make the money back, their investors remain happy, consumers get movies that are deemed ‘prestigious enough’ to cost as much as a big-budget blockbuster from the convenience of their couch, and the streaming service maintains its ambiance and measures success by total views, rather than total people paid. As the disruptor took over the world, every studio followed suit. This primarily made every movie continuously more expensive to drive their streaming services as opposed to their revenue, yet they don’t seemingly have the investors as the innovative brand that Netflix demands. This also spreads the consumer more thin, allowing less money to go into each service. Thus, Warner Bros and MAX, Paramount and Paramount+, NBCUniversal and Peacock, among others are all finding themselves in a financial crisis that never happened under the old Hollywood model, while Disney, Apple, and Amazon continue profitability by using their streaming services as loss-leaders to bring consumers to their other products in their portfolio that bring in a lot of money. The Netflix model of licensing every film and television show imaginable with no advertisements for $100 a year was never going to last, but it lasted long enough to scare every studio into making dire errors, and allowing Netflix to create a Hollywood stranglehold to their detriment.
This has had implications far beyond just film, but with a focus on film, the current box office climate shows that the old Hollywood model of low-to-mid budgets movies with more grassroots advertising budgets to supplement one or two larger films a year not only still works, but is what the consumer clamoring for. In a world where every niche interest is catered to through streaming, niche interests have become more socially acceptable. More budget-conscientious niche options back then would likely work even better now, seeing as homogenized ‘for everybody’ mindsets that have taken over every industry in the world is being widely rejected more than ever. There’s a model that works: and Terrifier 3, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, and Smile 2 all beating Joker Folie a Deux at the box office proves that it’s not too late to go back.
We may be trending in the right direction. Recently, it’s been reported that Daniel Craig has taken umbrage to the Knives Out sequels being hidden on a streaming service. Christopher Nolan broke his career-long partnership with Warner Bros after the simultaneously release of Tenet on MAX, and it was reported yesterday that Margot Robbie turned down a more-substantial offer from Netflix to distribute her upcoming Emerald Fennell adaptation of Wuthering Heights to ensure a theatrical release. There’s a resistance slowly but surely building around the current streaming model among filmmakers.
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