How did Joker 2 begin? Director Todd Phillips reveals the origins behind 2024’s hottest sequel

Instead of directing a conventional sequel, Todd Phillips swung for the fences in Joker: Folie à Deux, the highly anticipated follow-up to 2019’s Joker.

Before materializing as a movie, Joker 2 began as a Broadway dream from star Joaquin Phoenix, who won the Best Actor Oscar for his performance in the first film. 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 vision.

“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 said to Variety in a cover story. “Then we thought about doing it at the Carlyle as sort of a smaller thing. But COVID hit.”

Despite abandoning the stage production, Phillips liked incorporating music into a Joker sequel to tell Arthur’s story. Five years later, the result became Joker: Folie à Deux, a musical drama that brings together Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck and Lady Gaga’s Harley Quinn in a twisted love story. While Joker 2 includes musical elements, Phillips falls short 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 said. “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 events of Joker, Arthur is now a patient at Arkham State Hospital. While awaiting trial for his crimes, Arthur falls in love with Lee (Gaga). The duo descends further into madness as he explores the music that’s always 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 told 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.