Joker: Folie à Deux has been a flop so far. The movie has received a pretty poor reception from fans and critics alike, and the opening weekend ticket sales haven’t been great either. Granted the revenue flop element is a problem of Warner Bros. and DC’s own making as the sequel somehow managed to clock a reported budget of around $200 million and was claimed to need to rake in around $450 million to break even. As a point of comparison, the first film cost around a quarter of that to make, meaning its breaking even figures would have been around $100 million too.
With such a colossal failure in mind, you might be wondering how Joker: Folie à Deux ended up in this state, and potentially whether it was due to clashing creative choices between director Todd Phillips and new DC co-bosses James Gunn and Peter Safran. Well… that wasn’t the case at all.
Speaking at a pre-screening Q&A reported on by SlashFilm, Phillips affirmed that Gunn and Safran had zero input on the sequel and that he was simply allowed to cook and make the film he envisioned.
“With all due respect to [Gunn and Safran]. This is kind of a Warner Brothers movie, and that’s them also wanting it to be like, ‘Okay, Todd did his thing. Let Todd continue to do his thing.”
Granted Joker has always existed on the sidelines of any wider DC plans, so it’s not exactly surprising to hear that Phillips sequel wasn’t being contorted to fit into the new DC Universe. Looking back, perhaps it should have…