Box Office: ‘Joker’ Tops $1 Billion
By Joker will pass $1 billion worldwide today, on the second anniversary of the overseas release of Justice League.
As it enters its seventh weekend, Joker has a new domestic total of $316.692 million and a global cume of around $998 million worldwide. So today should be the day that Joker passes the $1 billion mark. The $62.5 million-budgeted DC Films flick crosses the $1 billion mark in raw global grosses. It’ll be, obviously, the first R-rated movie to hit this milestone and the third non-Disney/Universal movie to do so in just under a year. Prior to Warner Bros.’ Aquaman ($1.048 billion in 2018/2019) and Sony’s Spider-Man: Far from Home ($1.031 billion in 2019), no movie not from Disney or Universal had passed the $1 billion milestone since Paramount’s Transformers: Age of Extinction in 2014.
To be fair, changing exchange rates just between 2012 and 2014 arguably prevented Warner Bros.’ last two Hobbit movies from passing the milestone in 2013 and 2014, but $2.931 billion over three movies isn’t chump change. By the way, in 2012 we had four $1 billion grossers in one year, with two from WB (The Dark Knight Rises and The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey), one from Disney (The Avengers) and one from Sony (Skyfall). Two of those were 2-D flicks and none of them earned more than $86 million in China. Dark Knight Rises ($52 million), The Hobbit ($58 million), Skyfall ($59 million) and The Avengers ($86 million) treated China as essentially a bonus.