Incel-urrection?

The Joker is outperforming the spandex movies at the box office:

Our sources say the Joaquin Phoenix pic is poised to make at least $464 million after global theatrical, TV and home entertainment windows, and it could be more if the worldwide box office for the Todd Phillips-directed movie exceeds $900M. That amount of profit isn’t that far from what Avengers: Infinity War racked up last year in black ink: that pic made a half-billion dollars but was more expensive, with a production cost and global P&A of … a half-billion dollars.

This is despite a deliberate effort to sink the film for straying off-Narrative. At one point the New Yorker had two reviews running, one denouncing its sympathetic portrayal of a bullied white loner and another asserting the film's irrelevance. The politically correct assumed a two-part strategy with unthinking habit, casting the film as immoral (non-woke, or awakened to the wrong realities) on one hand and not worth your time (despite all the time the intelligentsia were investing in it) on the other; don't see this film was the shrieking subtext.

Of course all of this added up to the best promotional campaign a movie could ask for (I haven't seen it yet).

Joker‘s profit is also not that far from Black Panther‘s $476.8M, and way ahead of Aquaman‘s $260.5M (which at combined budget and P&A of $348M was 83% more expensive than Joker), Venom’s near $247M and Deadpool 2’s $235.4M.

Global theatrical rentals for Joker are figured at $421M. With the DC brand having stumbled after Justice League, Joker continues to show the Burbank, CA lot’s resilience with its feature comic book brand after Aquaman, their highest-grossing DC title ever at $1.15 billion, as well as its glass-ceiling crasher Wonder Woman ($821.8M, another film that Joker is besting in black, after she lassoed a profit of $252.9M).

Pro-regime propaganda like Wonder Woman and Black Panther benefit immensely from the voluntary hype of an approving media. These are movies already employing the broad appeal of bombs and bruised balls to give them legs globally. Remarkably, Joker is on track to surpass these films without even getting released in China:

Joker, given its oppressive society tone, isn’t expected to get a release in mainland China, meaning all of the pic’s offshore territories have been released.

Note that it's the white supremacist adjacent (or something) Joker that is censored social commentary in an authoritarian nation, and the most pc fare is waved right in.

For Joker to present itself as a brooding piece of social commentary and (word has it) not particularly entertaining, yet yielding so much better on investment than these films is remarkable and maybe a little scary to the people who wanted it to fail for the same political and social reasons they want Wonder Woman and Wakanda to succeed.

Production costs after New York City tax credits were $70M (though some say it’s lower in the $60Ms, we heard it’s higher) and global P&A is at $120M... 

Joker, meanwhile, is putting a few pics this autumn out of business, i.e., Gemini Man, and cutting into the ticket sales of others.

Like the Joker character, Joker is causing problems for the other scoundrels.