Warner Brothers Steps On A Land Mine

Well Joker Folie a Deux is finally here and the opening weekend box office numbers do not paint a pretty picture for one of Warner Brothers' largest franchises movies in 2024. The movie is estimated to open well below both  the original film's opening weekend and well below estimates at $40 million domestic against a $200 million budget.

If you're one of the small sample size who actually saw this movie along with me, you were probably curious about how this movie cost $10 million more than Dune Part Two. It's not like the musical numbers have a large amount of dancers or particularly extravagant set pieces that could drive up the cost of making the film. If not for the occasional musical number, the argument could be made that this feels like a sequel to a movie that performed well enough to warrant a direct-to-streaming sequel, just on a smaller budget.

The idea to take Joker, an incredibly successful movie built on the back of its massive haul by a devoted (and misguided) fanbase against a  comparatively tiny budget, and completely change it into something new, different, and almost designed to actively annoy that fanbase with almost four times the budget feels like actively courting disaster by the executives at Warner Brothers who have not had an overly fantastic year aside from Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. Perhaps this is a harbinger for things to come as Warner Brothers tries to exploit every franchise it possibly can.

Joker: Folie a Deux is now playing in theaters.