Todd Phillips Laughs Off ‘Absurd’ Critics of ‘Joker: Folie à Deux’ Budget

Samantha Bergeson
·3 min read

Todd Phillips is defending the budget of “Joker: Folie à Deux.”

The director, whose first “Joker” film went on to earn $1 billion at the box office in 2019, told Variety that he doesn’t understand why fans have complained about the ballooned budget for his upcoming sequel. The first “Joker” film cost $60 million, and while Phillips confirmed “Folie à Deux” is “much more expensive,” according to Variety, the budget was less than the reported $200 million.

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Frankly, Phillips said that number was “absurd,” but didn’t get why people cared anyways.

“I read these stories, and it seems like they’re on the side of the multinational corporations,” Phillips said. “They’re like, ‘Why does it cost so much?’ They sound like studio executives. Shouldn’t people be happy that we got this money out of them, and we used it to go hire a bunch of crew people who can then feed their families?”

“Joker: Folie à Deux” marks the return of Joaquin Phoenix in the title role. Lady Gaga plays Harley Quinn, who is Arthur Fleck’s (Phoenix) psychiatrist in Arkham Asylum. The film is set two years after “Joker,” and posed a different challenge for Phillips.

“The question became, ‘How can we top ourselves?'” Phillips said. “And you can only do that if you do something dangerous. But there were days on set where you’d look around and think, ‘Holy fucking shit! What did we do?'”

The first trailer for the film shows both Gaga and Phoenix singing and dancing. According to Variety, the feature begins with a “Looney Tunes-inspired cartoon starring the Joker before hurtling through prison riots, courtroom faceoffs and a variety-show sequence that finds Phoenix and Gaga portraying a homicidal Sonny & Cher.”

“The goal of this movie is to make it feel like it was made by crazy people,” Phillips said. “The inmates are running the asylum.”

And while the film includes music, it’s not at all like other musicals of recent years.

“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, emphasizing that the musical numbers are only in the minds of both Phoenix and Gaga’s characters. “No disrespect, because I loved ‘In the Heights.’ […] 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.”

Gaga agreed, saying, “Todd took a very big swing with this whole concept and with the script, giving the sequel to ‘Joker’ this audacity and complexity. 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.”

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