This might seem difficult to believe, but the American people appear to have no respect whatsoever for the elites who attempted to shame and scare them from seeing director Todd Phillips’ Joker.

After its second weekend in release, there is just no question Joker is a legitimate pop culture phenomenon. Although it cost just $55 million to produce (add another $35 million or so for promotion), the same movie that was sentenced to a lonely, twitching death at the hands of a thousand left-wing hot takes, is well into profit.

Assuming the breakeven point is around $200 million, Joker has already made that in North America alone ($193 million). This means that everything after $200 million is pure gravy, and a worldwide haul thus far of $544 million is an ocean of gravy.

Joker also has something that is known in the business of show as legs. In its second domestic weekend, Joker earned another whopping $55 million, which is a drop of just 43 percent compared to its first weekend’s $96 million haul. That kind of hold is almost unheard of for any movie, much less a front-loaded comic book flick that opened huge.

All of this success is even more amazing when you remember Joker is a very, very, very dark, R-rated movie with no super-heroics, no catharsis, just an unrelenting (and glorious) sense of dread and grimness. In tone and payoff, Joker is much closer to a Last House on the Left (1972) or Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986) than it is to any comic book movie, including Zack Snyder’s Watchmen (2009).

Nevertheless, thus far, according to Box Office Mojo, Joker has enjoyed the best October opening weekend in history, the second best-ever Fall opening (It: Chapter One is number one), the fourth best opening weekend for an R-rated movie ever, and the numero uno largest second weekend October haul ever, crushing second place Gravity’s $43 million.

Of the 50 so-called “top” critics at Rotten Tomatoes, more than 50 percent panned Joker. Of all critics, only 68 percent gave it a positive review, compared to 90 percent of the audience. But those numbers don’t even take into account the mind-numbing number of hot takes and “straight” news articles that condemned the movie as racist, as “dangerous” and “problematic,” as something that would encourage the whiteness in problematic Trump supporters to violently lash out against a world that uses words like “whiteness” and “problematic.”

When it came to Joker, the elite media were in full sabotage mode. Everything possible was done to cancel and blacklist the movie in the crib, and those the media could not shame into staying home, the media instead tried to terrorize with the assurance Joker would result in shooting massacres in movie theaters across the nation. (Fake news alert: despite the media’s best efforts, this did not happen).

Reading all of those melodramatic and alarmist hot takes, you would have thought Joker was a dangerous call to arms for red-hatted incels. What real people saw, through, what everyday moviegoers saw, is something very special: a totally unique and original movie-going experience produced for adults — a genre long thought dead.

Most of all, movie-goers saw a jaw-dropping central performance from Joaquin Phoenix, stunning cinematography, perfectly-realized world-building (New York City circa 1980), and a story so compelling it casts a hypnotic spell unlike any movie in recent memory.

My personal belief is that all those woketard hot takes were inspired by only one thing: the movie daring to put RESIST signs in the hands of Joker’s anarchist followers. That’s it. That’s all it was. A couple of shots of RESIST signs triggered a gajillion crybaby hot takes from a gaggle of thin-skinned losers genetically incapable of dealing with any kind of criticism. Yep, a couple RESIST signs and they all melt down like the stupid, spoiled, entitled 12-year-old girls they all really are.

As for me, I’ve seen Joker twice (here’s my review) and found it just as mesmerizing, disturbing, thoughtful, provocative, satisfying, oddly-moving, and entertaining as the first time. And I cannot wait to see it again.

Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC. Follow his Facebook Page here.