Sure, Terminator: Dark Fate won this weekend’s box office (albeit with lackluster numbers), but Todd Phillips’s controversial DC Comics title for Warner Bros., Joker, managed to stay in second place. The Joaquin Phoenix-led film has already been named the highest-grossing R-rated film ever, and its influence beyond the cinema and the critical circles that attend to it has been well documented. Now, it seems the seemingly disconnected comic book movie is about to enter an entirely different level of the box office stratosphere.
Thanks to its second-place finish at this weekend’s box office with a domestic haul of $13.9 million and $39 million overseas, which resulted in an overall total of $934 million, Joker is most likely going to hit — and cross — the $1 billion mark in the next few weeks.
Or, at least that’s what Forbes box office analyst Scott Mendelson thinks is going to happen. “Joker will probably pass $1 billion worldwide without a penny from China,” he wrote. “If the film continues this path… then it should get to the milestone within two or three weeks.” It is, he adds, “the first 2019 release not related to Disney or Marvel to cross $300 million domestic this year and… it could be the last.”
Should Joker manage to cross the $1 billion mark at the global box office, then it will become the 14th superhero-related film, and the fourth DC property, to do so. Only Jason Momoa’s Aquaman and the second and third films in Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy — The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises — have achieved this feat for DC and Warner Bros. The other 10 titles are either Marvel, Disney, or adjacent to both.
(Via Forbes)
