One of the biggest surprises in movies this year was the failure of The Joker: Folie à Deux. As a sequel to the Oscar-winning film of 2019 that broke box office records with over a billion dollars, there was high anticipation for Joaquin Phoenix’s return to the DC role and Lady Gaga joining as Harley Quinn. For a number of reasons, the film’s performance was extremely poor, earning less than $60 million domestically against an announced budget of around $200 million.
Numbers like these lead us to believe that most people did not go see this Joker 2 – and now is your chance to watch it without leaving your home. Warner Bros. has just announced its plans to release the film on home media starting on October 29th with digital and video on demand release. It will be available on all major platforms: Apple, Amazon, Fandango, and more.
The digital release will be followed by DVD, Blu-ray, and 4K release on December 17th. All of them (except for the DVD) will have the same special features, as outlined in the press release:
Everything Must Go (a 4-part long documentary)
- Can I Get a Cigar?
- Finding Lee
- A Hundred Films in One Film
- King of Nothing
Then four other features that are not part of this documentary:
- Music Featurette
- Live! With The Joker
- Colors of Madness
- Setting The Stage
Let’s be honest here. The Joker: Folie à Deux is not great. If it were great, it would have at least achieved moderate success at the box office. But the bad buzz, followed by bad reviews, killed it. (For clarity, the original film got 68% from critics and 89% from audiences on Rotten Tomatoes, while the sequel got 32% from both critics and audiences). But it’s still a sequel to Joker, which is clearly a divisive matter, so you can imagine that once it returns home, people will be curious and check it out.
But they might not feel curious about “paying to own it digitally or on disc”. If so, you’re talking about streaming. And although there is no news about when the film will air on Max, we assume it will be sometime before the end of the year.
Directed by Todd Phillips and co-written by him, The Joker: Folie à Deux was written in collaboration with Scott Silver, based on DC characters. The film is produced by Phillips, Oscar-nominated Emma Tillinger Koskoff, and Joseph Garner. Lady Gaga worked as a music consultant and the executive producers are Michael E. Uslan, Georgia Kacandes, Scott Silver, Mark Friedberg, and Jason Ropell.
Have you seen Joker 2 in theaters? If not, will you pay to watch it at home or wait for the streaming?
Looking for more io9 news? Find out the expected release dates for the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for DC Universe in film and television, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.
