With the up and coming Halloween season, the scary movie season is also on the horizon. One of the first spooky season movies to have been released was Joker Folie à Deux. The movie covers Joker as Arthur Fleck, where he is struggling with his dual identity and being a failed comedian. Arthur then meets the love of his life, Harley Quinn, while incarcerated at Arkham State Hospital. With big names such as Joaquin Phoenix playing the roles of Arthur Fleck and The Joker and Lady Gaga starring Harley Quinn, many critics and moviegoers alike expected the movie to be a huge hit. Well, it definitely was not.
“The sequel is a “traumatizing cinematic experience” and that Phillips “set fire to the whole idea of a comic book movie,” said movie critic Allen Johnson in Forbes Magazine.
It was also reviewed by Rotten Tomatoes: “The move was set on tediously considering its predecessor, Joker: Folie à Deux, offers nothing to the franchise. Content collapsed. Dramatically inert, devoting 138 very deliberate minutes to revealing what was undeniable from the first film.” Not only did the film industry critique the movie so harshly, but Rotten Tomatoes gave this movie a 33%, one of the lowest Rotten Tomatoes scores in 2024.
Aside from the jarring professional opinions and reviews, did the movie do its part to backlash this criticism on the business end? It quite clearly did not succeed financially either, as the movie had a production cost of $200 million, but box office revenue was only $165.3 million, leaving the movie with a deficit of $34.7 million, meaning this film will need to gross $450 million more to break even with its predecessor. This unsatisfactory response not only rested in statistical data and professional reviews, but the movie had a failure that was felt within its general target audience as well.
After watching the movie, fellow Rochester High School junior Manyaka Likine had some words to say on what he thought of this cinematic disappointment. “I thought the plot made no sense. They never explained what the trail would resolve. The movie jumped around, and none of the scenes were ever completed. The only parts I liked were the parts at Arkham, because they reminded me of the last movie. I didn’t like the court scenes though.” As word spread around about the movie, lots of social media posts also shared similar opinions about the confusion of the movie and the random plot. “Harley Quinn also played no role since the trails talked about what he did before he was sent to Arkham, and he met Harley at Arkham. Joker was still Joker, but the weird love story made him so boring, and in this one Arthur Fleck was more interesting since the movie was about him, which is not what I was expecting,” said Likine when asked about how he liked the characters that the movie showed and how they try to resolve their issues. In its entirety, Joker Folie à Deux was a massive flop.
Whichever way it is argued, the professional critics and Rotten Tomatoes have spoken out on this movie as a cinematic disaster, and the financial statistics follow that identical opinion all too well. Not only did the work and research of professionals severely downgrade this movie, but young teens and casual audiences also had very unsatisfied sentiments towards this film, as it blatantly kicked off the spooky Halloween movie season with a rock-bottom disaster.
