For the second weekend in a row, Todd Philips’s new movie Joker stayed at the top of the box office, taking in more than $192 million since its premiere. It’s a remarkable return on investment for a comic book movie that only cost $55 million to make, and it’s likely only a matter of time before one of the major studios tries the same formula again.
Enter David Harbour, host of this week’s SNL. In one of the pre-filmed segments for the episode, Harbor stars as the iconic Oscar in an ad for a Grouch, a movie about the societal decay and inevitable violence of life on modern-day Sesame Street. He appears alongside Kenan Thompson as a pimp Snuffleupagus and Alex Moffat as an extremely upsetting to look at Bert getting mugged.
Does anyone truly want a gritty reboot of Sesame Street? Probably not. But no one was asking for a third take on the Joker in less than five years, and that has paid off handsomely. So we may only be a year or two away from hyper-violent, live-action version of Arthur.