Betelgeuse just won’t die. After six weeks in theaters, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice beat out Warner Bros.’ own Joker: Folie á Deux for third place at the weekend box office. Tim Burton’s supernatural sequel eked past the $7 million second weekend of Joker 2 with $7.3 million, per The Numbers. While Todd Phillips’ musical Joker sequel suffered the worst drop ever for a comic book movie to the tune of 81.4 percent, newcomer Terrifier 3 — another R-rated movie about a killer clown — won the weekend with $18.8 million. The DreamWorks Animation movie The Wild Robot, which is new on digital this week, finished in second place with $14 million.
Since Warners summoned Michael Keaton’s Ghost with the Most into theaters on Sept. 6, Beetlejuice 2 spent its first three weeks at No. 1 until it was dethroned by The Wild Robot. It then fell to third place during Joker 2‘s opening weekend, but both Beetlejuice and Wild Robot rebounded while the Joaquin Phoenix and Lady Gaga-fronted flop plunged to 4th place in its second weekend. Rounding out the top 5 is the new LEGO-animated Pharrell Williams biopic Piece by Piece, which put together $3.8 million from 1,865 theaters.
Beetlejuice 2 added another $7.3 million for a domestic cume of $275.8 million ($421 million globally). The movie scored the second biggest September opening (behind 2017’s R-rated It) with $111 million domestically and the second-best second weekend for the month ($51.3 million, behind It‘s $60.1 million), proving there’s a lot of life in the 36-years-later sequel that Warners nearly sent straight to streaming on Max.
The Beetlejuice sequel cost just $99 million to produce, while Joker 2 cost a reported $190 million — nearly triple the $70 million budget of the first film, which went on to earn over $1 billion at the global box office. Joker 2 is looking to finish its theatrical run with $65 million domestically and around $210 million globally, far below the $500 million it would need to earn to begin to break even. A Joker 3 is officially dead, but say his name three times, and a Beetlejuice 3 could appear.
