It’s been officially confirmed that Joker: Folie à Deux, the sequel to the 2019 box office smash from DC, will be coming to theaters in 2024. The film will star Lady Gaga and Joaquin Phoenix, with the latter reprising his Oscar-winning role as Arthur Fleck, aka Joker. What’s more, all signs seem to point to the film being a musical, with rumors pointing to Gaga playing Joker’s love interest and mischievous partner in crime, Harley Quinn.
But just how will Joker make the leap from centering on a comic book villain cosplaying as Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle to a full-blown song-and-dance extravaganza? We think there’s a few different directions director Todd Philips could take, some of which might turn out to be surprisingly interesting.
5. Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
The macabre Tim Burton-directed film Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street is an obvious choice when it comes to movies that could serve as a template for unraveling the question of how to make a story about the Batman villain Joker the main subject of a musical. Not only is Johnny Depp’s Sweeney Todd a serial killer, a trait shared by Joaquin Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck in Joker, but the demon barber has an accomplice to his crimes, Helena Bonham Carter’s Mrs. Lovett. Swap out Lovett for Lady Gaga’s Harley Quinn — and set it in early-1980s Gotham City, instead of Victorian-era London — and you have the beginning of what could turn out to be a lovely meat pie of a Joker sequel musical.
If Joker: Folie à Deux has anywhere near the kind of quality music of Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler’s original 1979 Sweeney Todd musical, we’d be excited to hear it!
4. A Star is Born (2018)
Lady Gaga is not only a phenomenal pop singer, but she’s also a terrific actor, too. In fact, she was nominated for an Oscar for Best Actress in the Todd Phillips-produced A Star is Born. Actually, many aspects of the 2018 movie — for which she won an Academy Award for Best Original Song for “Shallow,” alongside Bradley Cooper — could make for a great starting point for Joker: Folie à Deux, now that we think about it.
For one, A Star is Born is about a passionate-yet-tragically-dysfunctional romance, with Gaga’s character playing an up-and-coming singer-songwriter and Cooper playing the jaded, alcoholic country singer that initially discovers her. While it’s not entirely necessary for Phoenix’s and Gaga’s characters in Folie à Deux to be literal musicians, the odd-pairing of a somewhat tragic figure — Joker — teaming up with a brighter soul — Harley Quinn — does go along the same lines of A Star is Born.
As far as musicals go, A Star is Born retains some of that gritty realism that would not be out of place in a Joker sequel. Rather than being of the show tune tradition, where characters break out into song and dance spontaneously, all the music in A Star is Born happens diegetically, meaning it occurs within the world of the film. They could possibly take the same route in Joker: Folie à Deux, although that may mean Dr. Harleen Quinzel perhaps moonlights as a lounge singer in the movie, in addition to being a psychiatrist at Arkham State Hospital.
3. The Pirate (1948) & Singin’ in the Rain (1952)
We have some reason to believe that Joker: Folie à Deux might just take inspiration from the Golden Age of Hollywood musicals. After all, the teaser for Folie à Deux — which was shared by Lady Gaga — contains the song “Cheek to Cheek,” which originally appeared in the 1935 musical Top Hat, starring Fred Astaire, with the song being penned by Irving Berlin. Gaga also covered the song as a duet with Tony Bennett.
When you consider how Joker featured an unreliable narrator — with Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck imagining an entire subplot of a romance between himself and Zazie Beetz’ Sophie Dumond — the same type of exaggerated reality could happen with the sequel. However, Joker: Folie à Deux could do the same thing, but from Harley Quinn’s perspective.
We already got a taste of how Harley turns things more colorful and theatrical in her own mind with 2021’s The Suicide Squad, in the scene in which Margot Robbie’s Harley imagines a cascade of flower petals exploding out of the exit wounds of enemies that she shot when she takes her rescue mission into her own hands. Why not take this concept and turn it up to 11 with a full-blown classic Broadway-style musical that all takes place in the mind of Gaga’s Harley for Joker: Folie à Deux?
There’s one particular tune from the history of musicals that we’d bet has a high probability of showing up in Joker: Folie à Deux, should the film take this route: “Be A Clown” by Cole Porter, as made popular by the 1948 musical starring Gene Kelly and Judy Garland in The Pirate. Kelly and Garland’s duet of the song would be the perfect template for Phoenix and Gaga to recreate in their own supervillain costumes for Joker: Folie à Deux.
That same melody, with altered lyrics, would appear in the 1952 Gene Kelly-starring film Singin’ in the Rain, reworked as “Make ‘Em Laugh,” and performed in the film by Donald O’Conner. This version of the tune would also not be out of place in Joker: Folie à Deux and we could imagine it as a pep talk Phoenix’s Joker gives to Harley as advice on how to sew the seeds of chaos while taking her under his wing.
Both versions of the song already have a history with Joker, as well, since “Be A Clown” and “Make ‘Em Laugh” were two episode names from Batman: The Animated Series, as the DC Animated Universe Wiki explained.
2. Next to Normal (2008)
With Harley Quinn potentially coming to life by pop star and actor Lady Gaga in Joker: Folie a Deux — the second actor to do so in a live-action movie after Margot Robbie’s inaugural portrayal in 2016’s Suicide Squad, and subsequent movies — there could be potential to actually position the narrative from her perspectively, entirely.
If the story took that route, Joker: Folie à Deux could resemble the 2008 rock musical Next to Normal. The Tony-award-winning Broadway play centers around a mother whose worsening bipolar disorder symptoms are chronicled throughout the story. We not only see the main character Diana Goodman’s journey, but also an exploration of how her mental condition affects her family.
With Harley Quinn’s origin as Joker’s psychiatrist, who eventually falls in love with the Clown Prince of Crime, Joker: Folie à Deux might trace Harley’s heartwrenching break with reality in favor of joining Joker. After all, “Folie à deux” is defined by the National Library of Medicine as “an identical or similar mental disorder affecting two or more individuals,” making the title of the Joker sequel possibly implying Harley will succumb to a mental condition comparable to Arthur Fleck’s journey into madness from the first movie.
While we’ve seen many iterations of Harley ever since her creation by Bruce Timm and Paul Dini in the beloved 1990s TV show Batman: The Animated Series, much of her story before meeting Joker has remained quite mysterious and would make for an interesting thing to unpack. Did Dr. Harleen Quinzel, as she was originally called, have a family before she met Joker? Did she have a tragic past, similar to Diana Goodman’s grief surrounding the loss of her son in Next to Normal? Perhaps there’s much more of a build-up as to why Harley began wearing a clown suit — other than solely Joker’s manipulation — that can be explored.
What’s more, taking inspiration from Next to Normal could be an opportunity for Joker: Folie à Deux to adopt a more compassionate and accurate approach to the subject matter of mental illness, in general. The first Joker movie was heavily criticized for some inaccuracies in its portrayal of mental illness as well as Arthur Fleck’s mental condition being generally vague and not well-defined. For instance, two psychiatrists wrote an op-ed in The Guardian in 2019 pointing out that though Joker depicts Arthur becoming more violent after he goes off of his medication, such a plot point only serves to arguably further drive stereotypes and mental health stigma.
“Studies show this association [of mental deterioration necessarily leading to violence against others] is exaggerated and people with severe mental illness are more vulnerable to violence from others than the general population,” doctors Annabel Driscoll and Mina Husain wrote in the piece.
By contrast, Next to Normal has been lauded for its accurate portrayal of the feelings bipolar patients really go through when they go off their medication, stemming from a desire to return to having manic symptoms, such as the lyrics from the song “I Miss the Mountains”:
“But I miss the mountains,
I miss the dizzy heights.
All the manic magic days,
and the dark depressing nights.”
“This is a common complaint from patients with bipolar disorder and can lead to individuals halting their medication—against medical advice—in order to experience their manic episodes again,” the National Alliance on Mental Illness noted about Next to Normal while also rating it as one of the top three musicals about mental illness in a blog post.
1. New York, New York (1977)
Everyone knows the first Joker movie took much inspiration from two character study films directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Robert DeNiro: 1976’s Taxi Driver and 1982’s The King of Comedy. If you ask us, those two movies really make Joker an obsolete film experience. That’s because, more often than not, Joker comes uncomfortably close to simply copying-and-pasting elements of those films, rather than achieving subtler homages to them. However, if a sequel were to make similarly overt nods to Martin Scorsese’s one-and-only musical, it would be nearly impossible for that not to generate something genuinely original and interesting.
Scorsese released one of his most out-of-left field experiments in between the two aforementioned neo-noir masterpieces: 1977’s New York, New York, a musical starring DeNiro and Liza Minnelli. Could this story about the tumultuous relationship between an aspiring saxophonist, played by DeNiro, and a band singer, played by Minnelli, be the inspiration for the upcoming Joker sequel? We hope so because such a premise could make Joker: Folie à Deux an even bolder attempt at crafting something more narratively compelling than the first film, given the under-viewed and somewhat under-rated possible inspiration.
While New York, New York attempted to mix the glamour of Golden Age musicals with the gritty realism of 70s cinema via its hard-hitting portrayal of a marriage on the rocks, adding the over-the-top criminal personalities of Joker and Harley Quinn as the stand-ins for DeNiro’s and Minnelli’s characters might bolster the blissfulness of the unlikely juxtaposition of genres. Such a contrast has great potential, and with Phillips’ clear love of Scorsese movies already established, we think New York, New York is most likely the film from which Joker: Folie à Deux will take inspiration.
Joker: Folie à Deux comes to theaters on October 4, 2024.
