Joker is Warner Bros.' highest grossing movie of the year. The Todd Phillips-directed movie has seen its fair share of publicity over the past few weeks. With that being said, it must be nice for the studio to see some positive publicity for Joker, even though this proves there really isn't such a thing as bad publicity. The violence and mental health controversies threatened to hurt the movie at the box office, but the critical acclaim and fan reaction has helped it to stay number one at the box office two weekends in a row.

As of this writing, Joker has made $548.2 million globally. The character study is Warner Bros.' second biggest opening weekend for a DC project, just behind Wonder Woman's 2017 opening of $103.2 million. It also broke an October opening record with $96.2 million. In addition, the Joker opening marked a career best for Todd Phillips, Joaquin Phoenix and Robert De Niro. Not surprisingly, the character study took down Justice League's opening of just over $93 million.

The $548.2 million global box office haul sets Joker up with a pretty healthy lead against its fellow Warner Bros. competitors. Andres Muschietti's IT Chapter Two has been underperforming when compared to the first installment and has stalled at $445 million, though it still has Joker beat domestically with $207 million, though that victory will more than likely be short-lived. Shazam! managed to bring in an expressive $364 million, Godzilla: King of the Monsters took in $385 million, while Detective Pikachu earned $431 million. Todd Phillips' latest has only been in theaters for just over two weeks, so we're obviously going to see these numbers get even higher, especially if it ends up getting any awards attention.

Joker stands alone within the world of DC movies at Warner Bros., which was the point from the beginning, according to Joaquin Phoenix and Todd Phillips. Phoenix warned early on that it was not going to be like other comic book movies and said it was more of a character study. When looking at what they did, that's exactly what they set out to do, though they more than likely didn't anticipate such a negative reaction from some moviegoers who were turned off by the violence and other aspects of the movie.

As for standing alone, Todd Phillips recently revealed that there are no Easter Eggs in Joker to tie it to other Batman movies from Warner Bros. Anything that fans spot is purely coincidence, unless someone in the art department is totally messing with the director, which could very well be the case. Regardless, everything has worked really well for the new take on the Clown Prince of Crime's origin story and fans seem to be really into what Joaquin Phoenix did with the source material. You can check out Joker's numbers over at Box Office Mojo.