Joker: Folie à Deux (2024): The film that deliberately demolished the success of 2019's Joker

🎤 Joker: Folie à Deux (2024): The film that deliberately demolished the success of 2019's Joker

In October 2024, Todd Phillips and Joaquin Phoenix released the most anticipated superhero movie sequel in five years: Joker: Folie à Deux. The first film in 2019 made $1.074 billion at the box office and earned Phoenix an Oscar for Best Actor. The pressure was immense. And yet, against all odds, Phillips and Phoenix delivered not a blockbuster replicating the 2019 formula, but a musical court-drama that methodically demolished everything that made the first film a success. The result: $208 million at the worldwide box office on a budget of $200 million — one of the biggest commercial failures in recent DC cinematic history, and probably the most unashamed artistic suicide in Hollywood in twenty years.

This article traces why Folie à Deux is a fascinating film despite (and because of) its commercial failure. On the agenda: Phillips' radical creative gamble after the Oscar, the arrival of Lady Gaga as Harleen "Lee" Quinzel, Arthur Fleck's court narrative structure, the numerous musical sequences that transform the film into an almost musical, the nihilistic ending that defuses all saga potential, the polarized critical reception, and the paradoxical legacy of a film that closed the Phillips' Universe by rejecting modern blockbuster codes.

🎬 Phillips' post-Oscar gamble: Refusing the classic blockbuster

When Warner Bros commissioned Todd Phillips to make a sequel after the triumph of 2019, the studio hoped for a blockbuster replicating the formula of the first: dark tone, social drama, intense acting performance, violent climax in a Gotham street. Any calculated filmmaker would have done this. Phillips did the exact opposite. He proposed a musical sequel, 70% of which takes place in a courtroom and in Arthur Fleck's Arkham cell. No chase scenes. No final bloodbath. No obvious political provocation. Just a man on trial for the murders of the first film, who meets a young woman obsessed with him, and who spends the film singing his fantasies while his trial crumbles around him.

This narrative decision is what makes Folie à Deux both fascinating and commercially suicidal. Phillips and Phoenix publicly explained their approach: they refused to turn Arthur Fleck into a franchise. The public wanted a more violent, more iconic Joker, ready to become Gotham's villain. Phillips gave them a broken man who doubts, who cries, who sings, who dreams of normal love. This radical inversion of expectations is probably the bravest gesture ever made by a modern DC film director. It is also the one that cost Warner $200 million in losses.

Why the musical tone?

The choice of the musical format is not an aesthetic whim. Phillips explained that the songs served to express Arthur's mental dissociation: when reality becomes unbearable, he takes refuge in musical fantasies where he and Lee form a perfect couple. This narrative technique is inspired by 1970s auteur cinema and some Bob Fosse classics. The problem is that it requires patience from the audience that the film's marketing had not prepared. Fans of Joker 2019 came to see a more violent Joker. They found Arthur Fleck singing American standards with Lady Gaga in dreamlike settings. The disappointment was massive and instantaneous.

💋 Lady Gaga as Harleen "Lee" Quinzel: A total reinvention of the character

The arrival of Lady Gaga as Harleen Quinzel was one of the film's biggest marketing stakes. Before Folie à Deux, Margot Robbie's version in Suicide Squad 2016 and Birds of Prey 2020 completely dominated the collective imagination surrounding Harley Quinn. Gaga therefore had to offer a radically different version to make her mark. And that's exactly what she does. Her Lee Quinzel is not the psychiatrist from the comics who fell in love with her patient. She is a young woman obsessed with Arthur Fleck after watching a TV movie about his crimes. This narrative inversion — Lee became a fan of Arthur BEFORE meeting him — changes the entire dynamic of the character.

This version of Harleen is deliberately unsettling. She lies to Arthur about her own life (she claims to come from a disadvantaged background when she actually comes from a wealthy family). She uses him to experience vicariously the transgression she doesn't dare commit herself. And she abandons him at the end when she realizes that he is not the myth she had imagined but a mundane sick man. This character construction is a deeply cynical reading of modern fan culture — Lee embodies the audience itself, the one who projects greatness onto famous criminals that they do not possess. To compare with Margot Robbie's version, which embraces the traditional love-codependency dynamic, the analysis Who played Harley Quinn in Suicide Squad provides the context of previous cinematic incarnations.

The chemistry that didn't work in theaters

Despite the caliber of the two actors (Phoenix, Oscar winner in 2020; Gaga, Oscar winner in 2019 for A Star Is Born), the on-screen chemistry between Phoenix and Gaga was deeply divisive. Several critics noted that the musical scenes broke the film's rhythm without always serving the narrative. Others, on the contrary, defended the approach, seeing it as a mise en abyme of the couple's fundamental incommunicability. Whichever side one took, the commercial result was unforgiving: the film did not find its audience. Joker 2019 fans were disappointed by the tone. Musical fans did not come to see a "comic book" film. Arthouse cinephiles remained cautious. Three potential audiences, none satisfied.

⚖️ Arthur Fleck's tribunal: The courtroom as a mental theater

The most radical narrative innovation of Folie à Deux is to set 60% of the film in a courtroom. Arthur Fleck is on trial for the five murders committed at the end of the first film — the three bankers in the subway, his mother, the TV presenter Murray Franklin. The entire dramatic question revolves around responsibility: Is Arthur Fleck a sick man who needs treatment, or the Joker, a distinct entity who must be judged as a criminal? This legal question progressively becomes an identity question — can Arthur save his life by pleading dissociation, or must he embrace his alter ego to remain loyal to his fans?

The trial allows Phillips to reintroduce several characters from the first film. The prosecutor calls Arthur's former colleagues, the social worker who cared for him before the cuts in aid, and his former neighbor to testify. Each testimony reminds the viewer of the humiliations Arthur suffered in the first film. But the trial also becomes a theater — Arthur eventually dismisses his lawyer and conducts his own defense disguised as the Joker, a scene that could have been the triumphant climax of the film. Phillips, however, chooses to make it the moment of revelation: Arthur doesn't maintain the role, he publicly collapses, and the audience that once admired him begins to see him as an impostor. This inversion is probably the most brilliantly constructed sequence of the film, but also the most contrary to audience expectations. To measure the gap between this approach and the classic comic book version of the Joker, a detour through Batman: The Killing Joke by Alan Moore provides the context of the canonical character.

💀 The nihilistic ending: Arthur Fleck is NOT the Joker

The ending of Folie à Deux sparked much debate. It reveals something no one in the audience expected: Arthur Fleck is not the real Joker. The real Joker is yet to come, in another film, by another director. Arthur was merely a precursor, an impostor, a man who accidentally lit the fuse without being able to become its embodiment. This final revelation is dramatized by a last scene where Arthur, held in Arkham, is stabbed by another prisoner who rejoices, proclaiming that he has just killed Arthur Fleck to make way for the real Joker. The camera pulls back on the killer's smile — who could be the real Joker from the comics.

This ending is profoundly consistent with Phillips' artistic vision. The Joker from the comics is, since Alan Moore, a character WITHOUT a fixed origin — his past is "multiple choice," he refuses any biography. Making Arthur Fleck "the" Joker would have established a canonical origin that would contradict all of the comic book mythology. Phillips chooses consistency with the source material at the expense of the audience's emotional satisfaction. This is probably the most respectful gesture ever made towards the Joker mythology in cinema — and also the one that most disturbed fans who wanted to see Arthur become "their" definitive Joker. To understand the contrast between this deconstructive ending and the historical Joker version that embodies the myth relentlessly, the analysis of Heath Ledger as Joker allows us to measure the gap between the two cinematic philosophies.

📉 The unprecedented commercial failure

The figures for Folie à Deux are brutal. Budget: $200 million. Worldwide box office: $208 million. Profitability ratio: 1.04x (whereas a modern blockbuster film must make at least 2.5x its budget to be profitable after marketing and distribution costs are deducted). Warner Bros lost several tens of millions of dollars on the operation. Worse still, the film caused a crisis of confidence in the auteur strategy applied to DC franchises — several similar projects under development (notably a Constantine film by Phillips) were frozen or canceled in the following months.

This commercial downfall is the exact opposite of the 2019 triumph. The first Joker had shown that an R-rated film, without superheroes, without a franchise, could make a billion dollars. Folie à Deux demonstrated the opposite: that the same director, with the same actor, with the same Oscar-winning actress added, can produce a resounding failure if the tone strays too far from audience expectations. This lesson has been learned by the entire industry. For the next decade, DC auteur films will probably be more cautious in their formal experimentation. To grasp the broader context of this crisis in DC cinema, a detour through the differences between The Batman 2022 and The Dark Knight trilogy allows us to measure other cinematic avenues still active.

How Warner justified the gamble

Despite the commercial failure, Warner Bros publicly defended the film as a deliberate artistic act. The studio acknowledged that the $200 million budget was probably oversized for the actual project, which should have cost a maximum of $80-100 million. This budget inflation was due to the salaries of Phoenix and Gaga, but also to the numerous musical sequences that require complex sets, choreography, and post-production. With a more modest budget, Folie à Deux would probably have been a relative success. At $200 million, failure was almost inevitable from the initial creative decision.

🎭 Critical reception: A deeply divisive film

The critical reception was massively divided. A significant portion of serious critics defended Folie à Deux as a courageous work that rejects modern blockbuster codes. Several praised Lady Gaga's performance as an acting revelation. Lawrence Sher's cinematography (who also shot the first film) was universally lauded. But the overwhelming majority of popular critics and Joker 2019 fans rejected the film as a betrayal of the first. On rating aggregators, the discrepancy between professional critic scores and audience scores remains one of the most stark of 2024.

🦇 The Paradoxical Legacy: A Film That Closed a Universe by Refusing to Extend It

In conclusion, Joker: Folie à Deux will go down in cinematic history as one of the most self-aware artistic suicides ever committed by a modern blockbuster filmmaker. Phillips and Phoenix deliberately demolished the franchise they could have extended indefinitely, in favor of an auteur vision consistent with their initial intention in 2019. This creative integrity comes at a cost — $200 million in losses for Warner — but it preserves the work from the franchise degradation that threatens all successful DC films.

With Folie à Deux, the Phillips' Universe is probably closed. Phillips has stated he is not planning a third film. Phoenix has indicated he considers Arthur Fleck a complete character. Warner is now focusing on James Gunn's new DCU and Matt Reeves' The Batman Part II. The Joker 2019 + Folie à Deux 2024 diptych will remain an autonomous cinematic object, self-contained and free from any continuity requirements. To explore the broader context of current DC cinematic universes, a detour through the complete timeline of Batman films and all the casts of all Batman films provides the full map. To understand the character these films attempt to embody, the complete history of the Joker in comics traces sixty-five years of the character's mythology that Phillips refused to definitively embody. And for those who want to extend the cosplay experience around the iconic couple, the Joker-Harley duo cosplay guide remains the best resource for physically embodying the two characters — whether you prefer them in the Phoenix-Gaga or Leto-Robbie versions.

🃏 To go further: situate this character in Gotham's complete criminal ecosystem by consulting the complete gallery of Batman's mythical adversaries, which gathers 36 villains classified by tier of narrative importance.