Joker: Folie à Deux is a corporate rebrand. The first film was a decidedly straight male phenomenon with Scorsese’s King of Comedy vibes and a full-on Oscar win for Joaquin Phoenix’s portrayal of the titular deranged villain. Its upcoming sequel, on the other hand, treads down different steps. “The question became, ‘How can we top ourselves?’” Todd Phillips says in an August Variety interview. The answer? Joker: Folie à Deux will be a musical fantasia starring pop icon Lady Gaga opposite Phoenix. (We can be certain, though, that the second movie is gunning for awards just like its predecessor.) Harley Quinn and Arthur Fleck fall in love at Gotham City’s Arkham Asylum, while Arthur stands trial for five (5) murders, two years after the first film. The sequel earned an R rating, unsurprisingly, and looks to be just the kind of Clockwork Orange nonsense to make Gaga feel right at home. Below, everything you need to know about the DC Universe superhero sing-along Joker: Folie à Deux, including the latest details on the whole “musical” situation.
Joker (Jacques Demy’s Version) Folie à Deux will, in fact, be a musical. And it might have even more music than you expected. In March 2024, Variety reported that the movie leans toward being “mostly a jukebox musical” — to the tune of at least 15 covers of “very well-known songs,” including “That’s Entertainment.” “There’s music, there’s dance, it’s a drama, it’s also a courtroom drama, it’s a comedy, it’s happy, it’s sad,” Gaga said at the time. Insiders said one or two original songs might also make the final soundtrack.
Ominous reports of a musical sequel first emerged in August 2022, when an insider told Variety that the sequel has “complicated musical sequences.” “I just don’t want people to think that it’s like In the Heights, where the lady in the bodega starts to sing and they take it out onto the street, and the police are dancing,” Phillips said most recently. Instead, they are using standards — like “Get Happy,” “For Once in My Life,” and “That’s Life” — but sung intentionally unprofessionally. “It was important to me that we never perform the songs as one typically does in a musical,” Phoenix told Variety in the same piece. “We didn’t want vibrato and perfect notes.”
The film’s composer, Hildur Guðnadóttir, thinks the musical route makes sense for Folie à Deux. “It’s an interesting decision,” she told Variety on January 15, 2023. “I think it’s somehow logical at the same time. It’s both logical and also very surprising for me as well as the audience. So far, it’s just been a really beautiful conversation, and I’m really excited to see how it unfolds.” Guðnadóttir doesn’t really dive into the “why?” of it all, but perhaps they didn’t want to waste Gaga’s classically trained voice or the opportunity to make a film even more inescapable than its predecessor.
And if all that weren’t enough, the movie also begins with a “Looney Tunes–inspired cartoon” featuring Arthur, per Variety. We’ve always said that Phoenix would make a good Porky Pig.
Arthur Fleck is giddy in the back of a paddy wagon heading to the trial of the century while his emphatic supporters greet his procession on the streets. A radio host says he’s not a martyr but a monster on a broadcast humming in background, to the Joker’s pleasure. And then he meets Harley Quinn at the psychiatric hospital. “When I saw you, for once in my life, I didn’t feel so alone anymore,” her voice-over scores as a riot ignites the facility. Joker sings “For Once in My Life” before it’s showtime at court. They sing and dance through the trailer, at one point taking the soundstage for a 1950s-esque TV show à la American Bandstand. “It’s okay, baby,” Harley Quinn says softly. “Let’s give the people what they want.”
Creative freedom? Todd Phillips is a Little Monster? The delicious promise of a Lady Gaga press tour? Mostly, it’s because Robbie’s Quinn exists in the DCEU, led by Josh Safran and James Gunn, which doesn’t include the Joker films or Matthew Reeves’s The Batman. Either way, Robbie gave Gaga her blessing in October 2022. “It makes me so happy because I said from the very beginning that all I want is for Harley Quinn to be one of those characters — the way Macbeth or Batman always gets passed from great actor to great actor,” she said in an interview with MTV News. “Someone gets to do their Batman, or someone gets to do their Macbeth.” Ah, yes, the opportunity to play the timeless Shakespearean role that is Harley Quinn. We are seeing herstory in action, folks.
It’s a fair question — over the course of her starring film roles (A Star Is Born, House of Gucci, now this), Gaga’s acting has become increasingly mannered. With a comic-book musical about mental illness leading to cartoonish evil, she’s got the Oscars vehicle to match. Whether or not she wins any awards for “best” acting remains to be seen, but we feel confident that she can make a play for any awards that ask for “most” acting. The poster for the film, released on April 2, shows Gaga as Harley being dipped by Phoenix’s Joker with his makeup smeared on her face like they’d just had a fierce make-out session. “The world is a stage,” reads the film’s tagline. Expect L. Gaga to be quoting Shakespeare for the entire press tour.
On Valentine’s Day 2024, Phillips shared three pics from the film, which included Gaga with the widest eyes known to man alongside Phoenix in full glam, a pic of the two waltzing, and the most Gaga pic of all: the two actors with their noses pressed together. Yes, that does mean we’re getting nose content in this film, even if the noses aren’t commented on. We just wanna take another look at her. To quote a musical Gaga is not starring in: Thank goodness.
It’s French for starring Lady Gaga a delusion or mental illness shared by two people. We’re not going to spell it out, but the title makes sense considering what we know about the plot of the movie.
The film bursts into song on October 4, 2024. The inevitable sing-along version has not yet received a release date.
Don’t hold your breath. “It was fun to play in this sort of sandbox for two movies, but I think we’ve said what we wanted to say in this world,” Phillips told Variety.
This post has been updated.