'Joker' is October's biggest box office opening ever with $93.5 million

No matter where you fall on Joker, there's no question that lots of people bought a ticket to see it for opening weekend.

The Joaquin Phoenix-led origin tale for Batman's famed arch-nemesis opened with $93.5 million in U.S. ticket sales. That's the largest opening box office ever for October, coming in considerably ahead of Sony's Venom – another comic book movie that opened in 2018 with $80.3 million.

It's also the fourth-largest opening to date for an R-rated movie, though it fell just short of breaking another record. The top three on that list – Deadpool, Deadpool 2, and It, respectively – all opened with more than $100 million, and they're the only R-rated movies to have achieved that distinction.

Still, $93.5 million is a massive success for Joker. It's much more of a character study than your typical 2010s comic book movie, focusing on the events that led to the creation of a persona that's tormented Gotham City – and, by extension, Batman – for so many years.

Joker is a hit overseas as well. It opened in 73 markets outside the U.S. and earned a total of $140.5 million from foreign audiences. None of those individual markets saw sales of more than $20 million, but South Korea, the United Kingdom, Mexico, and Russia led the way, with $10 million or more earned in each market.

Critics have been divided on the movie, due in large part to its handling of the title character's descent as a sort of dark power fantasy. Mashable's own Angie Han called it "toothless," comparing it to "a reply guy who hides behind the devil's advocate to voice all his most obnoxious opinions without actually owning them."

The question now will be if Joker can sustain this momentum. It's been the subject of controversy – potentially a point in its favor, as far as box office goes – due to Phoenix's portrayal of the character as a miserable, put-upon white man who acts out against a world that, in his mind, hasn't treated him fairly. If that sounds like a depressingly familiar profile for 2019, that's because it is.

The early discourse that followed Joker's August premiere at the Venice Film Festival featured suggestions by some that the movie could directly influence violent behavior. Then, in the weeks leading to its wide release, Warner Bros. released a statement reminding viewers that the movie isn't a hero's journey while theaters and police mulled how to handle the perceived risk of violence.

The specter of the 2012 Aurora shooting loomed large over the entire conversation, mostly because of the Batman connection. The shooting that killed 12 and injured 70 occurred during a midnight screening of The Dark Knight Rises, the last of three movies in Christopher Nolan's grim and gritty Batman trilogy.

There have, most unfortunately, been plenty of shootings since that incident in 2012. But Joker's deep divisiveness, coupled with widespread anxiety over the lax gun controls in America as well as the Batman connection, got a lot of people thinking about what happened just over seven years ago.

It's not the greatest thought, but all the controversy probably helped Joker's box office fortunes in the end, as controversy is wont to do. The question now is whether the curiosity that drove audiences to opening weekend screenings en masse will carry into the weeks ahead.