Why did Joker 2 lose so much money? And how on earth did it cost so much in the first place?

To quote Heath Ledger’s version of the clown prince of crime, maybe some wag should be scrawling “Why so serious?” on glass-fronted offices at Warner Bros Discovery this week, as executives there contemplate the box-office implosion of Joker: Folie à Deux. A catastrophic $37.7m opening weekend, the largest second-weekend drop for a DC film (81%), a worldwide take currently standing at a piddling $165m … how has the studio gone from the 2019 original, a billion-grosser that was then the highest earning R-rated film, to this?

If nothing else, the Joker is proving true to his reputation as an agent of chaos. But he is also the most beloved of comic-book villains from a storied franchise; a draw almost on par with Batman himself, making the disaster all the more unthinkable. With bubonic word of mouth, Joker: Folie à Deux is now projected to lose $125m-200m, depending on whose budget estimate you believe. If it’s the $300m figure being generally touted for production and marketing, then this is clearly what has hobbled the film; it would leave it needing as much as $475m to break even. Risky reinventions of hallowed pop-cultural icons are a lot more feasible on the first film’s sensible $60m budget.

$300m is a shocking amount. The money is up on the screen in the sense that director Todd Phillips and star Joaquin Phoenix were both paid $20m and supporting actor Lady Gaga $12m; over a quarter of the $200m production budget. But other than beautiful lighting and cinematography, and the climactic sequence, the film doesn’t look outrageously lavish. A cloistered affair set largely in Arkham State Hospital and the courtroom, there’s virtually nothing in the way of extended CGI pyrotechnics to explain the spend. The likeliest explanation is that it was a big bet born out of pandemic desperation for a surefire hit when cinemas reopened.

It seems doubly shocking in the light of Phillips and Phoenix choosing to make the film a musical – reportedly first considering it as a Broadway play. (The original’s staircase dance probably should have served as a warning.) Even on paper, the genre doesn’t promise the kind of returns obliged by the budget, unless you’re a children’s animation. And the sideways step out of realism into a cracked-voice travesty-musical was never likely to connect with the original’s core audience of Joker fanboys, let alone the embittered incel quotient whose preoccupations it channelled. Nor do you imagine that Lady Gaga – fine as she is in the role – corresponds to what they’re accustomed to with past psycho-hottie depictions of Harley Quinn.

It’s not Phillips and Phoenix’s fault that their top-heavy jamboree arrived on the wrong side of the superhero slump that has afflicted both DC and Marvel. Nor that it has lost the lightning-in-a-bottle factor from when Joker popped up mid-Trump presidency in 2019. Applying references to Scorsese toxic masculinity classics Taxi Driver and King of Comedy like an Instagram filter, it touched with exploitation-flick glee on themes of emasculation and repression, vicarious living through entertainment, and demagoguery’s potential. But it is on the pair that the lugubrious sequel struggles for much of its runtime to tap similar energies. It’s largely concerned with a dank deconstruction of the Joker persona, and hammering the audience over the head with further facile point-scoring about the American addiction to fame.

Phillips evidently wanted to course-correct after accusations that he had indulged toxic fandom in the first film. Having Arthur Fleck definitively dismiss the Joker as a pathetic psychological crutch certainly gets his point across.

But chastising the fanbase so openly is tantamount to box office self-harm (probably why the director refused to test-screen Joker: Folie à Deux). The impunity of a $300m budget seems to have led Phillips to mistake this for an auteur film, and shooting during a period of regime change at both Warner and DC reportedly allowed him to operate with weak oversight. According to Variety, he refused to liaise with new DC heads James Gunn and Peter Safran, saying: “With all due respect to them, this is kind of a Warner Bros movie.” But he also pushed back on new Warner president David Zaslav’s suggestions for lowering the budget, including moving the shoot to London rather than Los Angeles.

The film’s nosedive will have repercussions for the still-floundering DC and beyond. This kind of overly conceptual punt will surely become verboten in blockbusters for some time, and you wonder if it will force more conservative reimaginings of other returning icons, particularly Bond. It’s another question whether this almighty flop will give pause for thought in Hollywood about squeezing beloved IP until it has no more juice to give. Could Phillips’ sluggishness in converting realism into expressionism be something to do with the fact that this is the fifth major outing for the Joker in just over 15 years?

Maybe, with his 1970s lodestars, Phillips is currently thinking of the Folie à Deux debacle as a great act of subversion within the corporate studio system; the lunatics taking over the asylum, in the vein of Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider’s anarchic BBS outfit. Or maybe the film’s mood and message has simply come a few months too early. It has its powerful moments: Fleck’s final eruption of involuntary laughter even after renouncing his alter ego suggests a deep irremediable violence lodged inside America’s sternum. If Trump gets elected, or disputes a Harris presidency, Phillips’ banquet of cold psychological vomit may come to seem horribly on the money. Would that still count as having the last laugh?