When Todd Phillips‘ Joker was released in 2019, it was a phenomenal success at the box office – earning over $1 billion worldwide and becoming the highest grossing R-rated movie of all time (though Shawn Levy’s Deadpool & Wolverine took that record this past summer). Naturally, that performance set extremely high expectations for Phillips’ Joker: Folie À Deux, which was expected to dominate the film world for most of October 2024… but extremely high expectations have a tendency to create major surprises, and that’s exactly what we got this past weekend in theaters.
In the aftermath of Joker: Folie À Deux‘s underwhelming opening weekend performance, the domestic box office has a new number one movie, and to the shock of just about everybody, it’s Damien Leone’s indie slasher sequel Terrifier 3. Check out the full Top 10 below and join me after for analysis.
| TITLE | WEEKEND GROSS | DOMESTIC GROSS | LW | THTRS |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Terrifier 3* | $18,300,000 | $18,300,000 | N/A | 2,514 |
| 2. The Wild Robot | $13,450,000 | $83,737,000 | 2 | 3,854 |
| 3. Joker: Folie À Deux | $7,055,000 | $51,611,000 | 1 | 4,102 |
| 4.Beetlejuice Beetlejuice | $7,050,000 | $275,617,000 | 3 | 3,408 |
| 5. Piece By Piece* | $3,800,000 | $3,800,000 | N/A | 1,865 |
| 6. Transformers One | $3,650,000 | $52,851,000 | 4 | 2,758 |
| 7. Saturday Night | $3,435,269 | $4,189,000 | 18 | 2,309 |
| 8. My Hero Academia The Movie: You’re Next* | $3,007,420 | $3,007,420 | N/A | 1,845 |
| 9. The Nightmare Before Christmas | $2,300,000 | $89,907,116 | N/A | 1,700 |
| 10. The Apprentice* | $1,580,000 | $1,580,000 | N/A | 1,740 |
Extreme Buzz For Terrifier 3 During Spooky Season Leads Art The Clown To His Very First Box Office Crown
While Terrifier 3 is the fourth film to feature the savage slasher known as Art The Clown (following the anthology All Hallows’ Eve and the previous two Terrifier movies), it was really in 2022 with the release of Terrifier 2 that mass audiences started paying attention. The feature inspired many eye-catching headlines as the disgusting on-screen antics were literally causing people to vomit in theaters, and that generated a lot of curiosity. Made for just $250,000 (per Variety), it managed to finish its eight-week theatrical run earning $15.7 million worldwide.
Terrifier 3 just made more than that domestically in just three days.
According to The Numbers, movie-goers very much got into the Halloween spirit this weekend and made the new sequel the first title in the Terrifier franchise to top the box office. The new release played in a little over 2,500 theaters this weekend and managed to gross an impressive $18.3 million. Thanks to the earnings of its predecessor, the film had a bigger budget to work with – but “bigger” is obviously relative. It apparently cost $2 million to make a.k.a. one percent of the reported budget of Joker: Folie À Deux.
The Christmas-themed slasher premiered last month during Fantastic Fest 2024, and has earned positive marks from critics, including CinemaBlend’s Nick Venable, who calls it a “jubilantly gruesome gorefest” in his three-and-a-half star Terrifier 3 review.
It’s a big “wow” to see a microbudget film like Terrifier 3 win the box office in this fashion, but what isn’t a major revelation here is the movie-going audience’s hunger for exciting new horror movies. Those who follow the industry will remember Zach Cregger’s Barbarian and Parker Finn’s Smile performing exceptionally well in the weeks leading up to Halloween, and last year we got Kevin Greutert’s Saw X and Emma Tammi’s Five Night’s At Freddy’s.
This fall has already seen some big genre wins now with both Tim Burton‘s Beetlejuice Beetlejuice and Terrifier 3, and this hopefully sets up what should be an exciting stretch for 2024’s upcoming horror movies in the weeks ahead. I imagine that there are going to be a lot of people excited to see what kind of terror is unleashed in Parker Finn’s Smile 2, which arrives in theaters on Friday (first reactions are expected mid-week).
Will Terrifier 3 be able to remain in the Top 10 for the next two weeks as we get closer and closer to the end-of-the-month holiday? I expect it will – and it will be an interesting development to follow for the rest of October.
Joker: Folie À Deux Takes An Extreme Weekend-To-Weekend Dip, Falling To Third Place
If you haven’t heard or haven’t gotten the hint from this article thus far, people aren’t exactly over the moon about Joker: Folie À Deux. It earned disappointing reactions when it premiere at the Venice Film Festival in early September (I expressed my own disappointment in my two-and-a-half star CinemaBlend review), but audiences are downright hating it. The movie earned headlines last week for earning a “D” grade from CinemaScore surveys, and the low-30s scores from both audiences and critics on Rotten Tomatoes match that attitude.
Now, that derision has been fully represented in ticket sales. As noted, the movie had a notably soft opening weekend (it did less than half of the business that Joker did in late 2019), but it’s in its sophomore Friday-to-Sunday that we’re really seeing the blockbuster bleed. Ticket sales domestically dropped a staggering 81 percent, which is devastating for the release, and it dropped from first place to third place – with director Chris Sanders’ beautiful and wonderful animated feature The Wild Robot holding firm and winning its second silver medal after dethroning Beetlejuice Beetlejuice at the end of September.
It should go without saying that given its massive budget, Joker: Folie À Deux is going to go down in the books as one of the biggest box office failures of 2024. The $7.1 million that it added to its coffers domestically this past weekend brings its gross from the United States and Canada up to just $51.6 million. The title is getting a boost from overseas, as it has brought in $113.7 million to date from foreign markets, but Warner Bros. was surely expecting to have much more than $165.3 million in the bank thus far from the buzzy title starring Joaquin Phoenix (reprising the role that won him an Academy Award) and Lady Gaga (one of the world’s biggest multimedia superstars).
To add a bit more perspective to the film’s lacking performance thus far, 2019’s Joker was sitting pretty with $193.6 million in the bank on its tenth day of release domestically alone.
As noted above, Smile 2 , starring Naomi Scott, is set to be the next movie to take over the #1 spot at the box office, but we’ll have to wait until Sunday to see just how well it does. Be sure to head back here to CinemaBlend in one week to see the results, and in the meantime, you can learn about all of the titles getting set to hit theaters in the months ahead with our 2024 Movie Release Schedule.
