What Is the Metacritic User Score for Joker

The Metacritic user score for Joker (2019) stands at 8.9 out of 10, based on 7,757 user ratings—a notably high score that reflects strong audience appreciation for Todd Phillips’ psychological thriller.

This is particularly significant when compared to the critical reception, where professional reviewers awarded the film a Metascore of only 59, creating a stark divide between what critics and general audiences thought of the film.

The user score reveals that despite mixed critical assessments, viewers found compelling elements in the film’s exploration of violence, mental illness, and social alienation. The original Joker’s strong user score is especially noteworthy because it demonstrates how audience-driven platforms like Metacritic can tell a very different story than traditional critical consensus.

This article examines the Metacritic scores for both films in the Joker franchise, what those scores reveal about audience preferences, and how they compare to professional critical reception.

Table of Contents

• Why Does Joker (2019) Have Such a High User Score on Metacritic?
• The Critical vs. Audience Reception Divide
• Joker: Folie à Deux and the Dramatic User Score Decline
• What These Scores Reveal About Audience Preferences
• The Challenge of Polarized Reception and Review Bombing
• How User Scores Compare to Audience Sentiment Elsewhere
• The Future of the Joker Franchise and Audience Trust
• Conclusion

Why Does Joker (2019) Have Such a High User Score on Metacritic?

The 8.9 user rating for Joker reflects how powerfully the film resonated with general audiences, even when professional critics were more measured in their praise.

The film’s exploration of social marginalization, combined with Joaquin Phoenix’s transformative performance, clearly struck a chord with viewers who rated the film on Metacritic.

The 30-point gap between the user score (89) and the critical Metascore (59) illustrates how differently these two evaluative communities perceived the film’s merit.

This substantial audience approval likely stems from several factors: the film’s unflinching portrayal of mental health struggles, its dark cinematography and atmosphere, and its refusal to sanitize or moralize its subject matter.

Many viewers appear to have valued precisely what some critics found problematic—the film’s ambiguity about its protagonist and its willingness to present a disturbing psychological portrait without editorial judgment.

The 7,757 ratings that comprise this score represent a genuine consensus among people who paid to watch the film, rather than professional critics evaluating it through traditional film criticism frameworks.

The Critical vs. Audience Reception Divide

The most revealing aspect of the Joker scores is the yawning chasm between critics and audiences.

While Metacritic’s Metascore of 59 places the film in “mixed reviews” territory, the user score of 8.9 indicates audience enthusiasm bordering on universal appreciation. This 30-point gap is substantial and suggests fundamental disagreements about what makes cinema worthwhile.

However, it’s important to note that this kind of divergence isn’t unique to Joker—films that explore controversial or dark subject matter often generate these splits, since critics evaluate films within broader cinematic traditions while audiences may simply respond to emotional impact.

The Metascore pulls from reviews published on major publications, which tend to prioritize artistic craft, originality, and thematic consistency. Many critics recognized these elements in Joker but were concerned about the film’s implications or its impact on viewers.

The user score, by contrast, aggregates the immediate reactions of people who chose to see the film and decided their rating based on their own viewing experience. Neither score is objectively “correct”—they measure different things: professional assessment versus audience satisfaction.

Joker: Folie à Deux and the Dramatic User Score Decline

The 2024 sequel, Joker: Folie à Deux, presents a starkly different story on Metacritic, with a user score of 4.8 out of 10 based on 1,041 ratings (with approximately 47% of ratings being negative).

This represents an extraordinary drop from the original film’s 8.9—a decline of more than 4 points that signals significant audience disappointment with the sequel. The dramatic shift between the two films reveals how unpredictable audience reception can be, even within the same franchise and with the same director.

This severe divergence raises important questions about what audiences expected from the sequel and how it failed to deliver. The 4.8 score suggests fundamental issues with the second film’s direction, pacing, or thematic content that alienated viewers who had embraced the first installment.

Where the original Joker had over 7,700 ratings, the sequel’s 1,041 ratings (a significant reduction) also indicates lower engagement overall, suggesting both lower viewership and potentially more concentrated feedback from dedicated fans who were motivated enough to rate the film.

What These Scores Reveal About Audience Preferences

The dramatic divergence between Joker (8.9) and Joker: Folie à Deux (4.8) reveals that audiences don’t automatically follow filmmakers into sequels, even when the original earned overwhelming user approval.

The sequel’s poor reception suggests that viewers appreciated specific elements of the first film—perhaps its focus, its psychological density, or Joaquin Phoenix’s solo performance—that didn’t translate effectively to a two-character story with added musical elements.

This comparison illustrates a critical lesson in franchise filmmaking: audience enthusiasm for one film doesn’t guarantee tolerance for radical creative shifts.

The data also demonstrates that user scores, while sometimes dismissed as unreliable, can meaningfully capture shifts in audience sentiment across projects. The gap between 8.9 and 4.8 is not a minor fluctuation but a fundamental rejection of the sequel’s approach.

Audiences who enthusiastically rated the original apparently found the sequel’s inclusion of Lady Gaga, its operatic elements, and its expanded narrative scope to be misguided rather than expanding.

The Challenge of Polarized Reception and Review Bombing

One caveat worth considering when examining these user scores is the potential for polarized voting patterns.

User scores on platforms like metacritic can sometimes reflect passionate support or intense opposition rather than measured assessment, and films dealing with controversial themes are particularly vulnerable to both enthusiastic inflation and deliberate negative rating campaigns.

While the original Joker’s 8.9 score has substantial volume (7,757 ratings), suggesting a genuine consensus, the sequel’s lower volume (1,041 ratings) might carry different dynamics.

However, the sheer magnitude of difference between the two films—a 4+ point drop—suggests something more substantial than just rating volatility. The fact that nearly half of the sequel’s ratings were negative indicates systematic audience dissatisfaction rather than a few vocal detractors.

This represents real viewer disappointment, even accounting for the possibility that some users may have rated based on expectations rather than pure quality assessment.

How User Scores Compare to Audience Sentiment Elsewhere

The Metacritic user scores for the Joker films align reasonably well with anecdotal audience responses and other rating aggregators, suggesting they capture genuine viewer sentiment rather than being outliers.

On other platforms and in conversations among film audiences, viewers consistently expressed admiration for the original Joker’s ambitious tone and Phoenix’s performance, while expressing significant reservations about the sequel’s direction. The 8.9 score for the first film appears to reflect broadly distributed approval, not an outlier result.

The Future of the Joker Franchise and Audience Trust

The dramatic score decline from the first film to the second raises questions about the franchise’s future prospects under Todd Phillips’ direction. If audiences are this willing to abandon a character they enthusiastically embraced, future installments will face substantial audience skepticism regardless of critical reception.

The user scores suggest that the audience for Joker (2019) was interested in one specific vision that the sequel departed from significantly. Looking forward, the Metacritic user scores have established a clear benchmark: audiences rewarded focus and psychological depth with an 8.9 rating, but rejected stylistic expansion and narrative complexity with a 4.8.

Any future projects in this universe will likely need to either return to the original formula or take the risk of further audience alienation.

Conclusion

The Metacritic user score for Joker (2019) of 8.9 out of 10 represents strong and widespread audience approval of Todd Phillips’ psychological thriller, standing in stark contrast to the critical Metascore of 59.

This 30-point gap illustrates how different general audiences and professional critics can evaluate the same film, with viewers apparently valuing the film’s unflinching psychological portrait and Joaquin Phoenix’s transformative performance despite critics’ reservations about its implications.

The dramatic collapse to a 4.8 user score for Joker: Folie à Deux reveals that audience enthusiasm for the first film did not transfer to the sequel, suggesting that viewers responded to specific elements of the original that the sequel abandoned.

These scores matter beyond simple statistics—they document real shifts in audience sentiment and provide valuable data about what elements of cinema resonate with viewers. For anyone interested in understanding how audiences actually responded to these films, the Metacritic user scores tell a clearer story than critical consensus alone.

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