To quote Heath Ledger’s version of the clown prince of crime, perhaps a joke should scribble: “Why so serious?” at glass-fronted offices at Warner Bros Discovery this week, as executives there ponder the box office implosion of Joker: Folie à Deux. A catastrophic opening weekend of $37.7 million, the biggest second weekend drop for a DC film (81%), a worldwide take that currently stands at an insignificant $165 million… how has the studio evolved from the original from 2019, grossing a billion that was then the highest-grossing R-rated film, on this?

If nothing else, the Joker proves true to his reputation as an agent of chaos. But he’s also the most beloved comic book villain from a legendary franchise; a tie that’s almost on par with Batman himself, making the disaster all the more unthinkable. Thanks to word of mouth, Joker: Folie à Deux is now expected to lose between $125 million and $200 million, depending on whose budget estimate you believe. When it comes to the $300 million figure widely touted for production and marketing, this is clearly what held the film back; it would need as much as $475 million to break even. Risky reinventions of sacred pop culture icons are much more feasible with the first film’s reasonable $60 million budget.

$300 million is a shocking amount. The money has shown up in the sense that director Todd Phillips and star Joaquin Phoenix were each paid $20 million and supporting actress Lady Gaga was paid $12 million; more than a quarter of the $200 million production budget. But apart from beautiful lighting and cinematography, and the climactic sequence, the film doesn’t look excessively lavish. A contained affair that takes place largely in Arkham State Hospital and the courtroom, with virtually nothing in the way of extensive CGI pyrotechnics to explain the expenditure. The most likely explanation is that it was a big gamble born of pandemic desperation for a surefire hit when movie theaters reopened.

It seems doubly shocking in light of the fact that Phillips and Phoenix opted to turn the film into a musical – which was reportedly first considered a Broadway play. (The stair dance in the original probably should have served as a warning.) Even on paper, the genre doesn’t promise the kind of returns demanded by the budget, unless you’re a children’s animated film. And the sideways move away from realism into a cracked-voice drag musical would probably never connect with the original’s core audience of Joker fanboys, let alone the embittered incel quotient whose preoccupations it channels. You also can’t imagine Lady Gaga – as good as she is in the role – matching what they’ve come to expect with previous psycho-hottie portrayals of Harley Quinn.

It’s not Phillips and Phoenix’s fault that their top-heavy jamboree ended up on the wrong side of the superhero crisis that has hit both DC and Marvel. Nor that it has lost the lightning-in-a-bottle factor from when Joker emerged in the middle of Trump’s presidency in 2019. Applying references to Scorsese’s toxic masculinity classics Taxi Driver and King of Comedy as an Instagram filter, it touched on exploitation-flick glee on themes of emasculation and repression, living vicariously through entertainment, and the potential of demagoguery. But it’s to the pair that the lurid sequel struggles to tap into similar energies for much of its running time. It’s largely about a stuffy deconstruction of the Joker persona, and hitting the audience over the head with yet more easy point-scoring about America’s addiction to fame.

Phillips apparently wanted to correct course after accusations that he indulged in toxic fandom in the first film. Now that Arthur Fleck has definitively dismissed the Joker as a pathetic psychological crutch, his point certainly gets across.

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

The film’s nosedive will have ramifications for the still floundering DC and beyond. This kind of overly conceptual point is sure to be verboten in blockbusters for a while, and one wonders if it will force more conservative reinterpretations of other returning icons, most notably Bond. Whether this almighty Hollywood flop will provide food for thought about squeezing beloved IP until there’s no more juice to give is another question. Could Phillips’ slowness in turning realism into expressionism have something to do with the fact that this is the fifth major outing for the Joker in just over fifteen years?

Perhaps Phillips, along with his 1970s co-stars, currently views the Folie à Deux debacle as a great act of subversion within the corporate studio system; the lunatics who take over the asylum, in the vein of Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider’s anarchist BBS outfit. Or maybe the atmosphere and message of the film simply comes a few months too early. It has its powerful moments: Fleck’s final burst of involuntary laughter, even after renouncing his alter ego, suggests a deep, irreparable violence that’s burrowing into America’s sternum. If Trump is elected, or a Harris presidency contests, Phillips’ banquet of cold psychological vomit could come to seem like a terrible drain on the money. Would that still count as the last laugh?