It’s not an exaggeration to say that Warner Bros. is not happy right now. Still reeling from its expensive action prequel Furiosa disappointing at the box office over the summer, the legendary studio suffered further embarrassment when its long-awaited, $190 million follow-up to the billion-dollar-grossing 2019 hit Joker, Joker: Folie á Deux, flopped, grossing an embarrassing $37.8 million over three days. To put this in context, just over a month ago, the movie was projected to make over $100 million in its opening weekend.
What happened? Well, that’s a topic for another article, but the simple version is this: if it isn’t good, and no one is asking for it, people won’t see it. Period. Now the problem for WB is this: if few people wanted to see Joker 2 on the first weekend, what makes them think more will come on the second weekend?
That’s what may happen in the next three days as Joker: Folie á Deux is expected to drop at least 70% at the box office. That’s roughly in line with last year’s comic book flop The Marvels, which also debuted with a soft $46 million before dropping a massive 78% in its second weekend with a meager $10.1 million gross. For non-math nerds out there, that’s around $8 million to $10 million for the DC Comics sequel. Ouch.
What makes this worse is that the Joaquin Phoenix-led musical will be knocked off its first-place perch by a horror sequel that cost around $5 million to make. Terrifier 3, the latest chapter in the increasingly popular, and increasingly gory, franchise, is projected to gross at least $10 million, with an expectation that it will overperform and may hit $15 million by the end of next Sunday. That’s stunning for any film, much less one like Terrifier 3, to supplant a heavily hyped studio movie in its second weekend. That just doesn’t happen, ever, and it’s likely it will happen now.
It’s a bit poetic that a movie about a man who puts on clown makeup to mobilize an army of anti-social misfits will be defeated by a horror movie starring Art the Clown, who mainly appeals to the audience that the first Joker brought it all the way back in 2019. I just hope Terrifier 4 doesn’t have any musical numbers with Art tap-dancing on someone’s spleen.
Joker: Folie á Deux and Terrifier 3 are playing in theaters. Skip both and watch The Dark Knight again on Max instead.
China just gave Hollywood a cautionary tale about AI filmmaking. Sanxingdui: Future Past, billed as the country's first fully AI-generated movie, hit theaters on October 23 and bombed at the box office.
According to Futurism, the film's reported $1.5 million production budget landed on more than 10,000 screens. Yet it pulled in only about $181,000, averaging roughly $20 per screen, making the budget difficult to recover.
Some of the best shots in Grok Imagine’s AI-made Odyssey don’t contain actors. Ancient landscapes stretch into the distance. Close-ups of grimy hands suggest people who have touched something rougher than a keyboard. For a few seconds, the illusion holds.
https://twitter.com/imagine/status/2113712964419063911
YouTube videos could soon look better without eating quite so much data, right? Thankfully, the platform plans to introduce a new video format called AV2 on its web player in early 2027, promising more efficient streaming and potentially fewer playback hiccups on slower internet connections. The big headline is a roughly 30% improvement in compression efficiency over AV1, YouTube's existing video format. That doesn't guarantee every video will use 30% less data, but it could make streaming a little easier on both internet connections and data allowances.
What is AV2, and why should viewers care?