Joker: Folie A Deux and Borderlands | Studio heads reflect on disappointments

by Simon Brew |
Joker Harley Folie A Deux
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The studio bosses overseeing Joker 2 and Borderlands have been talking about their respective box office disappointments.

2024 has seen a some big hit movies on the big screen, but also some sizeable swings that didn’t quite pay off. In Warner Bros’ corner, there’s the recent Joker sequel, Joker: Folie A Deux. For Lionsgate meanwhile, it uncharacteristically pumped over $100m into the videogame adaptation Borderlands.

It would be fair to say that neither struck box office gold.

We’re in the part of the financial cycle where bosses do earnings calls to talk through their more recent performance. Warner Bros Discovery boss and movie deleter David Zaslav was up first, in a widely-reported chat where he’s hoped that the results of the US election help allow big businesses to consolidate more.

“Inconsistency also remains an issue at our motion picture studio, as reinforced recently by the disappointing results of Joker 2”, Zaslav said in an earnings call. The film’s box office has come in at just over $200m worldwide, less than a fifth of the original movie’s take. Zaslav didn’t go into greater detail beyond that, but at least he didn’t delete the film.

Over at Lionsgate, CEO Jon Feltheimer was talking about a streak of films for the studio that have underperformed. It’s not been its best year, with movie such as The Crow, The Killer’s Game and Megalopolis hardly setting tills chinging.

But financially, Lionsgate had more on the line with Borderlands, from director Eli Roth, and Feltheimer knows it. “On Borderlands, nearly everything that could go wrong did go wrong”, he candidly said.

“It sat on the shelf for too long during the pandemic, and reshoots and rising interest rates took it outside the safety zone of our usually strict financial models”.

Then, when it was released, it scraped together just over $32m at the global box office, taking with it any chance of a sequel.

Tough times for both studios, for differing reasons. Hopefully, both continue to support big swings at the cinema though.

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