After the box office failure of Joker: Folie à Deux, Warner Bros. CEO David Zaslav was reportedly furious about the costly misfire.
Joker was an unexpected phenomenon. The origin tale grossed over $1 billion worldwide and even earned Joaquin Phoenix an Academy Award for Best Actor. It really should have stopped there, but with that kind of money on the table, you can’t fault Warner Bros. for getting the ball rolling on a sequel. Unfortunately, Joker: Folie à Deux became one of the biggest bombs of 2024. The sequel only grossed $207.5 million worldwide and was trashed by critics, not exactly the glorious follow-up which the studio had anticipated. According to a report by Bloomberg, Warner Bros. CEO David Zaslav was left furious about the box office failure of Joker: Folie à Deux.
Zaslav reportedly met with Warner Bros. Motion Picture Group Co-Chairs and CEOs Michael De Luca and Pamela Abdy behind closed doors and “railed against” the costly misfire. He also attacked them for several other high-budget movies on the slate, which have the potential to crash and burn just like Joker: Folie à Deux. A Warner Bros. spokesperson is quoted as saying that the meeting was “a straightforward Joker 2 postmortem and a constructive conversation on the slate.“
When all was said and done, reports stated that Joker: Folie à Deux could potentially lose the studio up to $200 million. The film also failed to make a big impression once it hit PVOD and even picked up a large amount of Razzie nominations.
Our own Chris Bumbray wasn’t a fan of the sequel, feeling that it only exists because the first movie made a boatload of money. “Perhaps Joker was too big of a hit not to get a sequel, but watching Joker: Folie à Deux, you get the distinct feeling that this was an exercise in style for Phillips rather than a sequel that HAD to be made,” Bumbray wrote. “As it is, though, this Joker sequel spins its wheels and winds up being an often dull courtroom movie livened up by occasional flights of fancy into musical numbers. Those sequences are the best in the film, as without them, this would feel like a wholly unnecessary epilogue to what was originally a pretty powerful film.” You can check out the rest of Bumbray’s review right here,
