"Why so serious?" — Internet reacts to Korean trend where men angry at Joker 2 are sitting on seats reserved for pregnant women

Lady Gaga and Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker 2 has just been released on Wednesday, October 2, 2024. While the movie has been receiving mixed reviews as of now, Korean men who just watched the film are now creating a trend out of it.

Shortly after the movie's release, a trend in the South Korea became prevalant, according to which, the country's men seemingly identified with the Joker and flexed their anti-feminism beliefs by sitting on seats reserved for pregnant women.

The trend has now caught attention of netizens across the world, who went about bashing the group of men taking part in this trend. Here are some of the popular responses found on X:

A user tweeted:

"And they wonder why the birth rate is so low 🤡."

"Are Korean men really want to vanish their own country? How low they want the birth rate to be?" questioned another user pointing at the low birth rate issue.

"So he’s so mad about Joker 2 that he’s gonna go home and piss himself?? Okay… lol," read another tweet.

A number of similar reactions by internet users had been found all over X. A user wrote:

"Ewwwww what a bunch of weirdos 😭."

"Korean men are undoing all good publicity brought by kpop idols and its sad to see," explained another netizen.

"Manchildren at their finest," further declared a user.

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Film critics had previously mentioned that Lady Gaga was "drastically underused" in Joker 2

While the movie was released on Wednesday, October 2, it premiered on September 4 at the Venice Film Festival. That was when the movie began receiving some mixed reactions from viewers.

While the original 2019 movie Joker held a 69% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, the 2024 sequel is at 56%.

After the premier in September, IndieWire's David Ehrlich had previously reviewed the movie to be a "boring sequel". According to Vanity Fair's Richard Lawson, the movie seemed to be "startlingly dull."

Owen Gleiberman at Variety believed that the makers could not fully utilize Lady Gaga's talents in the movie.

According to Deadline, as of now, Joker: Folie à Deux would not be able to surpass the business made by the original one, which eventually became the second highest-grossing R-rated movie of all time at $1.07 billion.

The plot of Joker 2 continues from the chain of events of the previous film. While the movie seemed interesting, many reviews claimed that it lagged somewhere in the transition to a musical. According to Koimoi, the placement of certain musical pieces "didn't even make sense."

The movie is expected to raise about $80 million- 85 million, in the first wave on the global basis. During the same time, the 2019 movie made about $139 million globally.

Joker 2's first offshore release happened in Korea, with about $1.3 million. Some of the other major offshore releases include countries like France, Italy, Spain, Brazil, China, Australia, the UK, and Germany.