Joker director Todd Phillips and star Joaquin Phoenix wondered just how ridiculous a sequel could get if permitted.
DC’s Joker has been through the ringer ever since making his debut more than 80 years ago. Even on the small and big screens, the character has encountered his share of adventures, exploits and sheer menace. And it’s all about to evolve like never before. Many have argued that 2019’s Joker should have been a standalone film, but even those who welcomed a sequel never would have anticipated that it would be a musical. But that’s just where Folie à Deux will next take the Clown Prince of Crime. So, where else have Todd Phillips and Joaquin Phoenix envisioned Arthur Fleck?
Todd Phillips and Joaquin Phoenix were so enamored with Joker that they immediately started kicking around ideas for a sequel on the set of the first one. As Phillips told Empire, “Joaquin and I talked about another one the whole time while we were making the first movie, just because we love the character. We were obsessed with Arthur. We would almost joke about it: ‘Oh, we should take Arthur and we should do this.’”
As Phoenix tells it, he took the sequel ideas to an extreme, imagining Joker invading other well-known films, which doesn’t seem all that out of the realm of possibility since Joker imagines the character in the worlds of both Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy. “I had a curiosity about going further with the character. It felt like you could put him into almost any situation, and I would be interested to see how he would navigate it. I mocked up all of these posters of films that have already been made, like Rosemary’s Baby and Godfather, and I put Joker in them and I gave them to Todd. There was a running joke of, ‘What about Joker in space?’ But yeah, I was fascinated by where he would end up.”
Joker: Folie à Deux dances its way to theaters on October 4th after its premiere at the Venice Film Festival, where the first Joker won the prestigious Golden Lion in 2019.
Are you looking forward to this fall’s Joker sequel? Where do you see the character going after that? Put on a happy face and let us know below!