2019's Joker was a surprise sensation, grossing $1.079 billion at the box office.
The sequel came out last week, pairing Joaquin Phoenix's Joker with Lady Gaga's Harley Quinn. Given the success of the first film, I asked whether this would be another billion dollar film. When Manifold concluded that it wouldn't, I asked whether it would reach half a billion:
/SimonGrayson/will-joker-folie-a-deux-gross-over
/SimonGrayson/will-joker-folie-a-deux-gross-over-riaz031odg
The film has come out to poor reviews and disappointing opening. People are talking about it being an absolute flop. So now I'm asking whether the film will even make a quarter of a billion dollars.
The source of truth for this market will be the film's Box Office Mojo page here. The cutoff date will be 31st December - but if it's looking very close then I will wait for a week after that to see if the days up to the 31st are revised.
1,000
3.00@SimonGrayson Flagging this now, before resolution gets messy.
So BoxOfficeMojo currently lists this at >250M, but I am very confident that number is incorrect/bugged.
TheNumbers has it at 206M WW.
Other sources all agreed a few weeks ago on its pace of gross (until most stopped reporting weekly numbers because it wasn't grossing anything). It's implausible that 50M showed up out of nowhere when it was barely in theaters.
E.g. Variety just this week reported the 206M number.
BoxOfficeMojo lists the country-level grosses, and if you add them up it doesn't show the extra gross.
What I'm quite confident happened is that 206M is the correct WW gross (148M international, 58M domestic), but BoxOfficeMojo mistakenly lists 206M as the international gross. Thus domestic is being double counted in their WW total.
Most likely, BoxOfficeMojo will correct their mistake at some point. Usually they do. But not always—these sites are a bit understaffed and sometimes mistakes that don't matter much to most people will stick around for a long time. In any case, regardless of what BOM does, I would very much advocate not resolving to the obviously incorrect number (i.e. I'd just go with the consensus of reporting, which for a big movie luckily is very clear). But ultimately it's up to the creator, so you may want to chime on how you plan to resolve it if BoxOfficeMojo does not correct their mistake.
@Ziddletwix You’re right - so long as the countries don’t add up to the total, this looks like a bug/glitch.
We can presume that BOM will either update the totals or they will update the individual countries to explain where the missing $50 million has come from.
The wording of the market and the fact I’m using BOM as the source of truth means that if they don’t ever fix this then the market has to go with what they’re saying… But I don’t think that’s feasible. I’m guessing they’re going to fix this glitch shortly.
@Ziddletwix noticed the same thing, hence my wild selling and re-buying spree! But I agree, after looking through the numbers (and comparing with The-Numbers), I think BOM just listed total gross as international. I also dove into some international box office specific sites and couldn’t find anything that supported an extra $50 million international in just the last week. Wikipedia currently lists the the $264 number, but they’re just taking it from BOM.
@RobertTyphi haha it happens! sometimes you're first to spot something and you make it big. the times when you're right will make up for the times where you aren't
The current total according to Box Office Mojo. This includes estimates for the most recent weekend in some markets:
Domestic (ie. US & Canada) - $51.6m
International - $113.7m
Worldwide - $165.3m
It's been dropping like a rock in the domestic market - down over 80% from the first week to the second. That's one of the biggest drops ever seen for such a large film, even more shocking given how much of a drop off there had already been within that first weekend as people didn't go to see it on the Sunday because of poor word of mouth.
Can the film's chances of $250m be saved by any international markets which are still to open?
Here's my thinking: obviously it's not been received well. It likely won't have very high holds week over week. If the second weekend has a 64% drop (which if anything may be a bit generous), that puts it around 13.9 million. Plus it looks like it's going to come in around 8 or 9 million for this first Monday through Thursday, so call it 22.9 million for the first full week after its 37.7 million debut. Even if it ends up holding 54% week-over-week after, that's a domestic run of 87.5 million. Even if it maintained a roughly 2:1 international to domestic ratio, that wouldn't be enough to cross 250. Now one thing that gives me pause is the original Joker did 31% domestic and 69% international. That breakdown would be enough to get Joker to cross 250. All of which to say, I think this is a good NO at 50%, but I wouldn't take it at 40% unless it comes in even softer over the next few weeks (or international comes in lower).
@polymathematic It's also being released in China unlike the first Joker in 2019. That should bump the international number a bit. Japan opening this weekend is also worth watching. I do think it will underperform in both of those markets in line with first week openings, but by how much?
Yup I haven't investigated this one much, just betting NO by instinct here, but it's really hard to to project this one because the international splits are so weird. In some countries Joker 2 totally bombed (like domestic), while in some parts of Europe it did fine. It's harder to get data for individual european countries (I'm sure it's doable, but not worth the effort) so I dunno if people expect those European countries where it opened alright to now drop off a cliff, or if they'll hold. And while Joker 2 isn't supposed to do well in China, when you're trying to push it over $250M, even a modest opening there could swing it.
So I still think NO at 50-60% is fine just on the instinct that in the area where we do have clear daily results (domestic) it is absolutely plummeting, and it seems plausible that we'll see a similar WW drop. But all it would take is for Europe to continue to be ~ok for Joker 2 and it could probably cross 250