‘The wildest thing I’ve ever seen’: Say what you want about ‘Joker 2,’ but it did reverse the biggest disaster of 2024

2019’s Joker was a brilliant movie, with the inimitable Joaquin Phoenix’s tremendous Academy Award-winning lead performance anchoring it. That meant the excitement was palpable when a sequel was announced at the end of 2019.

However, once the second movie, Joker: Folie à Deux, was confirmed as a musical with Lady Gaga playing Harley Quinn, doubts about it started to creep into fans’ minds — and those doubts have proven to be justified, as early screenings didn’t go down well and it’s received a damning critical response since it hit theaters worldwide on Oct. 4.

It’s not very good and has been criticized for being oppressive, claustrophobic, and deliberately anti-crowd-pleasing, as well as for having a poor storyline that goes nowhere. James Gunn has seemingly distanced himself from it, and it’s more than noticeable that the new DC Studios logo is absent from the movie’s credits.

But a peculiar fact about Joker: Folie à Deux is that it’s so bad that it’s changing some people’s opinions about what was previously believed to be the worst film of 2024.

Which disaster is Joker: Folie à Deux being unfavorably compared to?

Another movie based on comic book characters, Sony Pictures Releasing’s Madame Web, was a critical and commercial disaster. It barely made back its budget and has a shocking 11% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. The fact that many of its stars, including Dakota Johnson and Sydney Sweeney, have mocked the film and have distanced themselves from its reception is proof enough of its disastrous status.

However, now that people have seen Joker: Folie à Deux, many movie viewers’ opinions of Madame Web are changing, with a number of them preferring the monotonous Sony serving to the DC sequel — in fact, as per the aforementioned X post, the Sony’s Spider-Man Universe offering has a higher CinemaScore rating than the Joaquin Phoenix film (Madame Web is currently rated “C+” while Joker: Folie à Deux gets a “D”). While CinemaScore isn’t really an accurate assessment of a film’s worth, it’s still a damning indictment, to say the least.

Madame Web was criticized for everything from its weak story, unlikable characters, and clunky dialogues to its uninspired fight sequences, poor visual effects, and Johnson’s unenthusiastic acting. It’s unfathomable that it’s rated higher than the sequel to an Oscar-winning movie’s sequel, but here we are at a point where Madame Web is being touted as entertaining, fun, and bouncy and getting praise for having a story to tell. What have you done, Todd Philips?