Last week, director Todd Phillips and actor Joaquin Phoenix confirmed that Joker 2 was in the works. The director used social media to share a photo of Phoenix reading the script, which was labeled Joker: Folie à Deux. This title alone offered us much to guess about in regards to the film’s plot, but we could never have imagined some of the film’s surprising developments. Here are the specifics:
All we know about the Joker sequel:
For quite a while now, director Todd Phillips had been co-writing the screenplay of Joker with co-writer Scott Silver and has now given it to the production. Phillips announced the name of this new project on Instagram last week, Joker: Folie à deux, which is a link to a clinical word for a mental disease that generally affects two or more members of the same family. While Phoenix was shown reading the script in the same Instagram post, his presence in the movie isn’t precisely a done deal just yet. Close sources believe, however, that Warner Bros. has yet to strike a deal with the actor, despite being in deep negotiations with him.
Related: Todd Phillips Confirms Joker 2, Joaquin Phoenix Set to Return
The all-new Harley Quinn:
Lady Gaga is in initial talks to headline the sequel as the Joker’s partner-in-crime, Harley Quinn. Joker is infamous for his on-again, off-again abusive relationship with Quinn, his mental hospital’s psychiatrist who falls in love with him and becomes his criminal accomplice. After Phillips announced the sequel’s title, rumors that Harley Quinn might feature in the film began to circulate. The term “folie à deux” alludes to a shared hallucinatory condition, and Quinn has been Joker’s sole true friend aside from Batman. This new Quinn, on the other hand, resides in a separate DC universe from Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn, who was most recently seen in 2021’s The Suicide Squad as well as a number of other movies.
The Joker sequel: A Musical?
Phillips’ decision to make Joker 2 a musical is another brave move after recasting the Dark Knight’s number one villain as a lonely anti-hero, which was a blockbuster success and an Oscar winner. This sequel is very different from the first film, which was a twisted and brooding character study set in a decaying metropolis in the late 1970s. Further than that, there are no other specifics concerning Folie à Deux, so it’s unknown whether Gaga will lend any music to the production. It’s a solid assumption, though, that it’s at least certainly negotiable.
Related: Joker 2 Announcement Gets Trolled as Fan Call It Another Cheap Martin Scorsese Rip-Off
