The reviews are in and, over on Rotten Tomatoes, both critics and audiences have more or less rejected Joker: Folie a Deux in equal proportions. The film, out today, is a follow-up to one of the highest-grossing movies in Warner Bros. history, but it’s getting off to a rocky start with disappointing projections for its opening weekend and fewer than 40% of critics giving it good reviews, according to aggregation site Rotten Tomatoes. On the site’s TomatoMeter, just 38% of critics have given the movie a favorable review — and that’s running almost exactly parallel to the audience-driven “PopcornMeter,” where the movie has scored a positive review just 36% of the time.
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Those numbers have been holding pretty steady all day — the similarity between the critical and audience reaction was noted at a time when the numbers were 39% and 37%, respectively. The original Joker scored a 68% “fresh” score from critics and 89% from the PopcornMeter.
That 20-point spread between the professional critics and fans tends to be fairly normal for big box-office tentpoles. Casual audiences, after all, just want to have fun while critics have a job to do. Deadpool & Wolverine had a 16-poitn spread between critics and audiences, and It Ends With Us doubled that, with only 57% of critics enjoying the movie as opposed to 91% of verified ticket buyers.
Some fans on social media have speculated as to whether Joker: Folie a Deux is the subject of review bombing, a practice that involves bombarding a movie with negative reviews, due to its incredibly low audience review score on Google. It’s not uncommon for there to be a big split between the audience score on Google and the Popcornmeter, since Rotten Tomatoes wants to verify your ticket purchase in order to avoid review bombing. Still, even if you were to remove 3/4 of the 1-star reviews from Google’s current crop, and recalculate the user average, it would likely not bring the score up to a “passing grade.”
Folie a Deux also does not seem to be as controversial as Joker was, with some people refusing to see it, or slamming the movie, on political grounds. The only people really upset about Joker 2 are the ones who had no idea it was a musical, and who were taken aback by that aspect of the movie in theaters. It doesn’t seem likely that’s enough cause to review-bomb a movie (although it’s hard to hold people who are prone to review-bombing to any particular standard).
Joker: Folie À Deux stars Joaquin Phoenix as Arthur Fleck and Lady Gaga as Harleen “Lee” Quinzel, with Brendan Gleeson (The Banshees of Inisherin) as Jackie Sullivan, Catherine Keener (Get Out) as Maryanne Stewart, Zazie Beetz (Deadpool 2) as Sophie Dumond, Steve Coogan (the Alan Partridge comedies) as Paddy Meyers, and Harry Lawtey (The Pale Blue Eye) as Harvey Dent.
