Joker 2’s failure is exposing a major Hollywood hypocrisy
This weekend, Joker: Folie à Deux opened in the American box offices with an incredibly lackluster $37.7 million. To put that in perspective, the infamously awful Morbius made $39 million during its opening weekend in 2022. Joker 2‘s box office bomb is even more distinct because it cost Warner Bros. $200 million to make.
In other words, Joker 2 performed awfully and is likely not to pull a profit, instead putting Warner Bros. in debt. When you perform worse than Morbius, you’d think a major existential and financial reckoning would be at hand. And yet—there seems to be nothing of the sort coming from either the media or Warner Bros. itself.
I’ll give you one guess as to why.
Male-led films get all the slack
When The Marvels, Marvel Studio’s first all-female-led film, pulled in $46 million on its opening weekend, people acted like the world was crashing down. The Hollywood Reporter published misleading headlines which felt designed to shame director Nia DaCosta.
But after Joker 2‘s flop, the very same Hollywood Reporter posted a widely-panned tweet encouraging director Todd Phillips to “hang in there.”
To be sure, flops happen, and an attitude of grace when dealing with people who have put years of their life into the project is the right way to go. What’s absolutely infuriating is that this attitude is only afforded to men. And even more specifically, to men in live-action—but more on that later.
When a female-led and / or female-directed film flops, there’s this impulsive feeling that we must have some discourse about whether female-led films actually make money. This happens in the media and on social media feeds alike, and it’s almost always accompanied by cast and crew receiving online abuse. It’s hard to overstate how much effort goes into the discourse of, “Hmmmmmm, do people really want to watch women? Do action?!”
Beloved satirical website The Onion summed it up rather nicely after The Marvels flopped: “Men Explain Why Female-Led ‘The Marvels’ Failed.”
By those rules—as Twitter / X user Diamanda Hagan blithely pointed out—after Joker 2 bombed, we should be having a discourse about how no one wants to watch films about straight white men. You might be tempted to laugh that the very idea, but that’s entirely the point. Straight white dudes are still so thoroughly Hollywood’s “norm.”
A female-led film is the exception—and so when one of them bombs, it’s way over-analyzed. It becomes a moment of culture war contention. As dumb and overblown as the discourse is, studios—like any other major company—are constantly worried about their investors. It’s likely to have real repercussions.
But Philips? He’ll be able to shrug it off, no problem.
The bias was there from the start
The bias towards Joker: Folie à Deux did not begin when people treated its box office bombing—or Morbius‘, or Aqua Man 2‘s—notably more sympathetically than female-led, fellow superhero-centered projects like The Marvels or Madame Web. It started as the film was nearing completion.
Normally, a film will get a few test screenings before it goes into wide release. This gives a studio—like Warner Bros., in Joker 2‘s case—a chance to anticipate how audiences react to the film. Depending on the reaction, films can be re-edited or even shoot new material after the test screening.
Reportedly, Warner Bros. declined to do test screenings for Joker 2 at all. Which, considering that both reviews and audience reactions to the film were nearly universally poor, is unfortunate. It’s also highly unusual. But it’s especially infuriating because of Warner Bros.’s penchant to cynically toss away projects for extra cash.
The two most publicized examples of this are Batgirl and Coyote v. ACME. Both tested well, with Coyote v. ACME testing exceptionally well. And yet, both were thrown in the trash for a tax return, never to be seen by audiences.
It all ties into Joker 2‘s kinder reception because Batgirl, as the name implies, was female-fronted, and Coyote v. ACME was a hybrid of animation and live-action. And if there’s one thing David Zaslav’s modern iteration of Warner Bros. thinks lowly of, it’s animation.
Waiving test screenings and getting kindly pats on the back for flopping are luxuries—the former simply a bad idea, the latter a grace which should be extended to every creator. Hopefully, one day female-led projects that fall short of studios’ expectations will receive the same kind of sympathy Joker 2 has received.
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