Anyone paying attention to box office should know Todd Phillips’ Joker is having an incredible run. However, after a very tight race against Maleficent: Mistress of Evil this weekend, it turns out what many lauded as a Joker win actually went to the Disney sequel.
It’s a case of the PG-rated movie just eking out the R-rated one. The final numbers are in and Maleficent: Mistress of Evil actually made $19.37 million at the domestic box office over the weekend. It just barely inched ahead of Joker during the Friday-Sunday weekend tally, as the latter made $19.25 million (via Variety).
This is in contrast to the original tally, which had Joker inching ahead with $18.9 million to Maleficent: Mistress of Evil’s $18.5 million. The Addams Family was in a distant third place with $11.7 million.
The good news? Both movies did quite a bit better than the initial numbers indicated. The bad news? Jokes on Joker this week. However, the latter movie should take some comfort in the fact that it is just crushing everything in its path overall.
Internationally, Joker has already pulled in $852,031,557 at the box office, with nearly $278 million of that coming from the domestic box office. That’s a huge chunk of change for a movie with an alleged budget of $55 million, but it may fall shy of the $1 billion dollar mark.
Meanwhile, Maleficent: Mistress of Evil has won the box office for two weekends now, but still struggled a bit out of the gate. So far, it has made a bit over $66 million domestically and $295.6 million in total. While the sequel will have a few more weeks to make money at the box office, it is certainly underperforming compared to 2014’s Maleficent, which ultimately made $758 million worldwide.
Given Maleficent: Mistress of Evil’s budget of around $185 million – and that’s before advertising –we’ll have to wait and see if this one is able to break even. So, any positive news should be a win for the House of Mouse at this point.
Regardless of all of these details, it’s been a good October, mostly thanks to Joker becoming the biggest October release ever, and it’s not over yet. The year isn’t close to over, either, and there are a slew of big releases coming in the next few weeks. I’ll just mention Terminator: Dark Fate, Doctor Sleep and Ford vs. Ferrari, but that’s the tip of the iceberg, really.