10 Most Divisive Movies Of 2024
8. Joker: Folie à Deux
No film released this year has endured a more volcanic audience response than Joker: Folie à Deux.
Todd Phillips' much-anticipated sequel not only made the bold choice to fashion itself as a quasi-musical, but also spent much of its runtime seeming abhorred by the notion that anyone enjoyed the Oscar-winning original at all.
So much of Folie à Deux is concerned with renouncing the cult of celebrity surrounding Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix), both within the movie and outside of it, in a manner that quite unsurprisingly left vast swaths of the original's fans fuming.
The sequel however absolutely has its vocal defenders who respect Phillips for doing anything but deliver a conventional follow-up, with some even insisting that Folie à Deux will be viewed considerably more favourably 10 or 20 years from now.
But for anyone who expected the sequel to build on the first film's Joker origin story, Phillips did everything within his power to deny them that pleasure.
This resulted in a brutal "D" CinemaScore - a score lower than both Borderlands and Megalopolis, to be clear - and a pitiful box office haul of just $206.4 million, less than one-fifth of what the first film grossed worldwide.