Saying that Joker: Folie A Deux underperformed at the box office is a considerable understatement.
Despite being led by the A List duo of Lady Gaga and Joaquin Phoenix, the movie’s entire domestic run only generated $58 million which is just 60% of the amount its predecessor made in its opening weekend.
The movie’s plot surrounds Phoenix’s eponymous anti-hero who meets the love of his life while struggling with his dual identity in an asylum. Its melange of musical and action sequences deterred audiences and led to it earning a D rating from CinemaScore, the lowest it has ever awarded to a comic book movie.
The final insult came less than a month after the movie premiered when it was pulled from theaters and switched to streaming platforms. According to industry analyst Box Office Mojo, its worldwide takings of $206.4 million put it far outside the highest-grossing films of 2024. However, there is one area where it went toe-to-toe with many of the top performers and won.
It is hard to fault the job that the Warner Bros. marketing team did with the movie. Thanks to its curious casting choice it came across as being one of the most intriguing movies of the year and Warner capitalised on this.
When the ten highest-grossing movies of 2024 are ranked by the level of media coverage they generated over the year to date it shuffles up the pack. Instead of being dominated by Pixar’s children’s movie Inside Out 2, Deadpool & Wolverine tops the list with 34,306 articles putting it head and shoulders above second-placed Beetlejuice Beetlejuice which had 28.5% less coverage.
‘Deadpool & Wolverine’ may not have topped the box office this year, but it has been untouchable in … [+]
Both movies benefited from extensive marketing campaigns but one appealed much more to cinemagoers than the other. Review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes shows that Deadpool & Wolverine earned an audience score of 94% whilst Beetlejuice Beetlejuice stands at 79%. It suggests that if a movie doesn’t resonate with the public then no amount of marketing will help. Joker: Folie A Deux is even clearer evidence of this.
The list below shows that although Inside Out 2 didn’t have as much media coverage as its rivals in the top ten, this didn’t stop it from claiming the box office crown. In contrast, Joker: Folie A Deux didn’t even make it into the top ten based on its gross even though the 23,578 articles about it would put it in third place on the media coverage ranking, comfortably ahead of Inside Out 2, Dune: Part Two and Despicable Me 4.
Media coverage of 2024’s highest grossing movies so far
Only the English names of the movies were entered into the search so it is likely that the totals would increase if foreign translations were included. Likewise, the search only covered the official names of the movies so the results do not include any coverage which refers to ‘Joker 2’ or ‘the new Joker movie’.
The data was extracted from Factiva, a media search engine owned by Dow Jones which includes content from 33,000 news, data and information sources in 32 languages from 200 countries. Its archive is constantly updated and contains more than two billion articles with the oldest dating back to 1944.
Not so long ago a movie like Joker: Folie A Deux would have been a dream ticket for a studio. A peculiar premise and an A List cast went a long way regardless of whether or not the movie was likely to capture the hearts of the public. If the studio commissioned a blockbuster marketing campaign it put the production on the radar of its target audience and if it was too tantalising for them to miss they would stream through the theater doors until word of mouth got round that the film wasn’t worth seeing. The rise of social media along with the pandemic put paid to that.
When theaters shuttered during the pandemic people got their movie fix from streaming services and became hooked. As Neil Macker, a senior equity analyst for Morningstar Research Services, explained to Variety, “people have become conditioned to expect that things will quickly appear” on streaming platforms.
It meant that the need for theaters had diminished by the time that their doors swung open again. This was the first part of a perfect storm which has brought the curtain down on theaters and even the chains which operate them.
In the immediate aftermath of the pandemic many people were put off by the prospect of sitting in a crowded and confined space for hours whilst a deadly disease was raging.
No sooner had the threat of Covid-19 receded than the war in Ukraine flared up. That soon fueled a cost of living crisis as the war led to increases in the price of everyday essentials at the same time as taxes began rising to cover the bailouts during the pandemic. It pulled purse strings tight putting further pressure on theater admissions. This explains why the 2023 global box office of $33.9 billion was 15% down on the average of the three pre-pandemic years from 2017 to 2019 according to Gower Street Analytics.
‘Beetlejuice Beetlejuice’ is the third most talked out movie of the year
These factors have contributed to theaters falling out of favor with today’s youth, especially the Gen Z who were teens during the pandemic and grew up watching movies and shows on their phones. Adults who grew up with theaters clearly still have a soft spot for them which is why movies like Deadpool & Wolverine and Beetlejuice Beetlejuice still shine. Likewise, theaters are a relatively cheap way of keeping younger children occupied which explains why last year’s highest-grossing films were Barbie and The Super Mario Bros. Movie whilst Inside Out 2 tops the 2024 list.
Getting other demographics through theater doors is now more challenging than ever before as streaming is so cheap and convenient. Social media was the final nail in the coffin.
When many cinemagoers start streaming through the doors after watching a new movie the first thing they do is post their reactions on social media. Their feedback is seen around the world in seconds so potential viewers no longer have to wait to find out through word of mouth whether a movie with an peculiar premise is worth watching. Audiences quickly decided that Joker: Folie A Deux isn’t worth it despite the wall-to-wall media coverage of the film.
Given the sway that social media can have it remains to be seen whether it is worth studios spending hundreds of millions of dollars on marketing movies. All it takes is for one out-of-theater reaction to go viral and that spending is all in vain. The biggest losers aren’t actually the studios but the theaters themselves.
The decline in traffic has put theater chains in jeopardy and in July 2022, Europe’s biggest privately-owned operator, Vue, was taken over by its lenders.
Two months later the curtain came down on the US operations of the world’s second-largest cinema chain, Cineworld. The US arm of the London-listed company went into Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in September 2022 and although it has since emerged from this, its UK operation is still trying to do a restructuring deal. Five of its theaters closed last month alone and a further 18 are reportedly at risk. It doesn’t stop there.
Earlier this week private equity giant Fortress bought UK arthouse cinema chain Curzon for an undisclosed sum from real estate magnate Charles Cohen who had owned it since 2019. Fortress reportedly lent Cohen millions of dollars but sued him earlier this year for default and then became the only bidder for Curzon at a foreclosure auction. The sale secures the future of its 16 sites as well as its film distribution company and online streaming service which together employ more than 350 staff. That really is a happy ending.
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