Blowing away all expectations, the Joker movie is closing in on a billion-dollar box office with talks of a sequel also underway.
The current box office for Joker has it at almost $950 million with the flick expected to hit a billion in the coming weeks.
That is a tremendous number for Warner Bros. and director Todd Phillips as, reportedly, the flick only cost around $50 million to make.
To put that number in perspective, a movie like The Avengers: Endgame would need to have brought in upwards of $7 billion to be an equivalent, but then there is also the problem that something like an Avengers: Endgame has is that not as much profit is made because of all the actors and high costs associated with the film (as confirmed by Disney). Joker may even pass Infinity War in terms of profits.
What is also huge for Joker is that it is going to hit a billion dollars without a release in China, which will make it the first movie to do so since the release of Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight back in 2008.
So we see Joker is laughing all the way to the bank.
Joker could spawn a sequel
Regarding talks of a sequel, Joaquin Phillips recently revealed that he and director Todd Phillips spoke about the possibility while filming the first movie. Phoenix even said he had specially made posters designed to promote the idea of a Joker sequel and feels there is a lot left for the character.
“Long before the release or before we had any idea if it would be successful, we talked about sequels,” Phoenix told the LA Times. “In the second or third week of shooting, I was like, ‘Todd, can you start working on a sequel? There’s way too much to explore.’ It was kind of in jest — but not really.”
Regarding the posters, they had Joker inserted into old movie posters as a tongue-in-cheek way of showing director Todd Phillips what might be possible.
“I basically said, ‘You could take this character and put him in any movie,’ ” Phoenix said. “So I did a photo shoot with the on-set photographer and we made posters where I Photoshopped Joker into 10 classic movies: ‘Rosemary’s Baby,’ ‘Raging Bull,’ ‘Yentl …’ ” He laughs. “If you see it, you’re like, ‘Yeah, I’d watch that movie.’ ‘Yentl’ with Joker? That would be … amazing!”
Todd Phillips also chined in about the possibility of a Joker sequel.
“We haven’t talked about it a ton,” Phillips said. “We’ve only talked about the fact that if we ever did one — and I’m not saying we are because right now we’re not — it couldn’t just be this wild and crazy movie about the ‘Clown Prince of Crime.’ That just doesn’t interest us. It would have to have some thematic resonance in a similar way that this does.”
Warner Bros. is also recommending the movie for the Oscars, and I also refer to Joker as the “MCU Killer.”
Joker Box Office Numbers:
Domestic: $303,201,694
Foreign: $645,400,000
Worldwide: $948,601,694
