If all the signs are right, Joker—Todd Phillips’s gritty origin story about Batman’s nemesis—is going to be a blockbuster smash. Per early tracking, the movie is set to make $155 million worldwide when it opens this weekend. It’s a strong and possibly surprising turnout for the film, which for weeks has been plagued by concerns that it will incite violence because of its source material. The film traces Joker’s rise from mentally unstable loner to unhinged gunman, and has been criticized for glorifying, intentionally or not, the kind of behavior exhibited by mass shooters.

Ticket buyers, however, don’t seem bothered—and some box office analysts think all the controversy has actually worked in the film’s favor. “I generally find that if a movie has a lot of buzz going for it, great critical reviews, has become part of the conversation…I think that’s only going to help the movie,” says Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst at Comscore. It also helps that Joker is not your typical shiny, happy comic book movie he said. “Remember, this is an R-rated, very dark film. If there’s controversy surrounding a lighthearted family film, that can be a problem, [but] we’re talking about the Joker here.”

Stateside, Joker is expected to make a little over $80 million, an impressive haul considering its reported $55 million budget and its R rating.

“If tracking had been at $50 or $60 million, we’d all be saying that’s great for this kind of movie,” says Shawn Robbins, chief analyst for BoxOffice Media. “But now expectations are kind of high.”

If Joker makes over $80.25 million, it will beat the domestic October record previously set by Venom, Sony’s 2018 offering starring Tom Hardy that was, like Joker, a dark spin on comic book source material. But Joker is unlikely to beat Venom’s global record, which was a $207.4 million debut.

As both Robbins and Dergarabedian point out, Joker originally felt like more of a prestige play, an attempt to get DC comic book movies back into the awards space after the high of Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy. However, a combination of raves on the festival circuit—including a big win at the prestigious Venice Film Festival—and nonstop chatter surrounding the movie’s controversial plot have given the film a dark hype. “We’re in uncharted territory here,” Dergarabedian said. “I don’t know of any other movie that had all the jigsaw pieces going into place.”

While movies like Deadpool and Logan are somewhat comparable—unconventional comic book movies with R ratings—Joker is still a world away from those films, namely because of its grim lead and the increased security warnings for upcoming screenings. Some early viewers have voiced concerns that it’s overly sympathetic to real-world violent loners, and might inspire mass shooters in the mold of James Holmes, the gunman who killed 12 people and injured 70 more in 2012 during a movie theater screening of The Dark Knight Rises in Aurora, Colorado. The growing concerns have forced law enforcement to beef up security around Joker screenings; the NYPD, for example, is planning to station undercover police officers at screenings; similarly, the LAPD has promised “high visibility” during screenings.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Army sent a memo to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, about a potential threat discovered on the dark web. Other theaters, like the Landmark chain, are also taking extra precautions by banning people in masks, painted faces, or costumes from attending screenings. The Aurora theater that Holmes attacked in 2012 has opted to not screen Joker at all, while family members of Aurora shooting victims have written a letter to Warner Bros., asking the studio to take responsibility for viewer safety. The studio responded in a statement, noting its “long history of donating to victims of violence, including Aurora,” and adding that “neither the fictional character Joker, nor the film, is an endorsement of real-world violence of any kind. It is not the intention of the film, the filmmakers, or the studio to hold this character up as a hero.”