Joker: Folie A Deux Earns The Worst Ever CinemaScore For A Comic Book Movie

It's fortunate that Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix) is no stranger to booing audiences, because "Joker: Folie à Deux" isn't exactly a crowd-pleaser. Director Todd Phillips' follow-up to his billion-dollar 2019 hit "Joker" made history this week when it received a D CinemaScore from opening day audience polling.

It's the first comic book movie ever to earn such a low score since CinemaScore's records began in 1978. Yes, it's even lower than "Morbius" (C+), "Madame Web" (C+), and "Superman IV: The Quest for Peace" (C-). On Rotten Tomatoes, the critic and audience scores are currently in perfect synchronicity, with both giving "Joker: Folie à Deux" a "rotten" score of 32%.

The earliest box office forecasts had pointed to a potential $100 million opening weekend, but projections were downgraded to $70 million last week in the wake of bad reviews. With Friday ticket sales counted, "Joker: Folie à Deux" is set to fall far short of even those tempered expectations with an estimated $47 million opening weekend (per The Wrap). That's roughly half the $96 million start that "Joker" got in 2019. This wouldn't be an issue if "Folie à Deux" had been made for $55 million, like the first movie, but the success of "Joker" meant that Phillips was given a massive $200 million budget for the sequel. Unfortunately, a bigger budget doesn't always make for a better movie.

Even for those who disliked "Joker: Folie à Deux," its historically low D CinemaScore may be a bit of a shock. After all, even widely-hated DC movies like "Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice" and "The Flash" managed B grades. However, unlike typical movie ratings systems, CinemaScore tends to focus on whether or not a film delivered on the audience's expectations and left them feeling happy, rather than how good or bad it was. Highly-praised horror movie "Hereditary," for example, received a D+ CinemaScore, and horror movies in general tend to be graded poorly.

In the case of "Folie à Deux," failing to meet audience expectations may have been the killer factor. For starters, the movie is a musical but the trailers took great care to hide that fact, and both the director and the leader actors, Joaquin Phoenix and Lady Gaga, shied away from the "musical" label. This is an increasingly common marketing trend; even the trailers for "Wicked," which is based on a famous Broadway musical, have avoided showing characters actually singing. As a Deadline article explained last year, "test-audience focus groups generally hate musicals and the only way to get people into the theater with one is to trick 'em."

Surprise musical numbers alone aren't enough to explain audiences' rejection of "Joker: Folie à Deux," though. After all, "Wonka" hid its musical nature from the trailers but still managed an A- CinemaScore. Looking at the response online, it seems the bigger issues are the sequel's underlying hostility towards comic book fans, its failure to develop Phoenix's character, the generally uneventful nature of the story ("nothing happens!" is a common refrain), and — above all — the deliberately subversive ending.