Instead of directing a standard sequel, Todd Phillips swung for the fences in Joker: Folie à Deux, the extremely anticipated follow-up to 2019’s Joker.
Before materializing as a film, Joker 2 started as a Broadway dream from star Joaquin Phoenix, who received the Best Actor Oscar for his efficiency within the first movie. Phoenix pictured his character, Arthur Fleck, singing and telling jokes onstage in his Joker costume. However, the logistics of a musical on Broadway deterred the duo from pursuing Phoenix’s imaginative and prescient.
“When we started really thinking about it, we realized it takes four years to put something like that together. And is Joaquin really going to give six months of his life to do that every night onstage,” Phillips stated to Variety in a canopy story. “Then we thought about doing it at the Carlyle as sort of a smaller thing. But COVID hit.”
Despite abandoning the stage manufacturing, Phillips favored incorporating music right into a Joker sequel to inform Arthur’s story. Five years later, the consequence turned Joker: Folie à Deux, a musical drama that brings collectively Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck and Lady Gaga’s Harley Quinn in a twisted love story. While Joker 2 consists of musical parts, Phillips falls in need of categorizing the sequel as a musical.
“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 stated. “No disrespect, because I loved In the Heights.”
Phillips added, “Most of the music in the movie is really just dialogue. It’s just Arthur not having the words to say what he wants to say, so he sings them instead.”
Set two years after the occasions of Joker, Arthur is now a affected person at Arkham State Hospital. While awaiting trial for his crimes, Arthur falls in love with Lee (Gaga). The duo descends additional into insanity as he explores the music that’s at all times been inside him.
“Todd took a very big swing with this whole concept and with the script, giving the sequel to Joker this audacity and complexity,” Gaga informed Variety. “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. It’s a testament to [Todd] as a director, that he would rather be creative than just tell a traditional story of love.”
Joker: Folie à Deux arrives in theaters on October 4, 2024.
Thank you for reading this post, don't forget to subscribe!