Despite all the controversy, the ‘Hard-R’ rating, and the low budget, Joker has become Warner Bros’ highest grossing film of the year.
Here to prove the old adage that there’s no such thing as bad publicity is Joker. The film prior to its early-October release came under a lot of fire, even with the FBI getting involved and issuing a warning about potential shootings at premiere screenings.
Even with all this, and the strict age rating closing off a lot of potential customers, Joker is the highest grossing film Warner Bros Studios has made this year. Clocking in at US $548,290,190 worldwide gross at the time of writing.
This makes the film already more profitable than other films Warner Bros has circulated this year. These films include Shazam! with a gross of US $364 million, Detective Pikachu with US $431 million and even IT: Chapter 2 at US $445 million.
Read our review of Joker here!
With a production budget of US $55, it’s about as modest as you can get for a ‘superhero’ movie, with The Dark Knight featuring Heath Ledger’s Joker having a budget of over US $180 million. It’s unclear right now if Joker will manage to rake in over a billion dollars as The Dark Knight did, but in just over a week, Joker is already one of the most profitable films of the year.
The film follows Arthur Fleck, a failed comedian with a variety of mental health issues. In the film, we gradually see Fleck descend into madness and resort to crime as a way to fightback against the society that has oppressed him for so long. The film is highly violent and comes at a time in the world where the gun crime the film portrays is all too real in our own society.
It’s easily one of the most controversial films of the year, if not the last 10. According to Box Office Mojo, it’s already the third highest grossing ‘Controversial’ film of all time – films which “created headlines over their allegedly controversial subject matter,”
