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, had grossed $1.074 billion at the box office and earned Phoenix the Oscar for Best Actor. The pressure could not have been higher. And yet, against all expectations, Phillips and Phoenix delivered not a blockbuster replicating the 2019 formula, but a musical courtroom film that methodically demolishes everything that made the first one a success. The result: $208 million at the worldwide box office on a $200 million budget, one of the biggest commercial failures in the recent history of DC cinema, and probably the most deliberate act of artistic suicide in Hollywood in twenty years.

This article explains 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, the narrative structure of Arthur Fleck's trial, the many musical sequences that turn the film into a near-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 the codes of the modern blockbuster.

🎬 Phillips' gamble after the Oscar: rejecting the classic blockbuster

When Warner Bros commissioned Todd Phillips to make a sequel after the 2019 triumph, the studio was hoping for a blockbuster that replicated the first film's formula: dark tone, social drama, an intense lead performance, a violent climax on a Gotham street. That is what any calculating filmmaker would have done. Phillips did the exact opposite. He pitched a musical sequel in which 70% of the action takes place in a courtroom and in Arthur Fleck's cell at Arkham. No chase. 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 movie singing his fantasies while his trial collapses around him.

This narrative decision is what makes Folie à Deux both fascinating and commercially suicidal. Phillips and Phoenix explained their approach publicly: they refused to turn Arthur Fleck into a franchise. Audiences 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 an ordinary love. This radical reversal of expectations is probably the bravest move 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 a musical format is not an aesthetic whim. Phillips explained that the songs serve to express Arthur's mental dissociation: when reality becomes unbearable, he takes refuge in musical fantasies where he and Lee form the perfect couple. This narrative technique is inspired by 1970s auteur cinema and a few Bob Fosse classics. The problem is that it demands a patience from audiences that the film's marketing had not prepared them for. Fans of the 2019 Joker came to see a more violent Joker. They found Arthur Fleck singing American standards with Lady Gaga in dreamlike sets. The disappointment was massive and instant.

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

The arrival of Lady Gaga in the role of Harleen Quinzel was one of the film's biggest marketing stakes. Before Folie à Deux, Margot Robbie's version in 2016's Suicide Squad and 2020's Birds of Prey completely dominated the collective imagination around Harley Quinn. Gaga therefore had to offer a radically different version to stand out. And that is exactly what she does. Her Lee Quinzel is not the comics psychiatrist who falls in love with her patient. She is a young woman who became obsessed with Arthur Fleck after watching a TV movie about his crimes. This narrative reversal (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 poor background when she actually comes from a wealthy family). She uses him to live out, by proxy, the transgression she does not dare commit herself. And she leaves him in the end when she realizes he is not the myth she had imagined but an ordinary sick man. This characterization is a deeply cynical reading of modern fan culture: Lee embodies the audience itself, the one that projects onto famous criminals a greatness they do not have. To compare with the Margot Robbie version, which fully embraces the traditional love-and-codependency dynamic, the analysis Who played Harley Quinn in Suicide Squad provides context on the previous film incarnations.

The chemistry that didn't work in theaters

Despite the caliber of the two actors (Phoenix an Oscar winner in 2020, Gaga an Oscar winner in 2019 for A Star Is Born), the on-screen chemistry between Phoenix and Gaga sharply divided viewers. Several critics noted that the musical scenes broke the film's rhythm without always serving the story. Others, on the contrary, defended the approach, seeing in it a mise en abyme of the couple's fundamental inability to communicate. Whichever side you take, the commercial result was relentless: the film did not find its audience. Fans of the 2019 Joker were disappointed by the tone. Musical lovers did not come out for a "comics" movie. Arthouse cinephiles stayed cautious. Three potential audiences, none of them satisfied.

⚖️ Arthur Fleck's courtroom: the trial as a mental theater

The most radical narrative innovation of Folie à Deux is setting 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 on the subway, his mother, and TV host Murray Franklin. The entire dramatic question revolves around responsibility: is Arthur Fleck a sick man who needs treatment, or is he the Joker, a separate entity who must be tried as a criminal? This legal question gradually becomes a question of identity: can Arthur save his life by pleading dissociation, or must he embrace his alter ego to stay loyal to his fans?

The trial allows Phillips to bring back several characters from the first film. The prosecutor calls Arthur's former coworkers to the stand, along with the social worker who looked after him before the funding cuts, and his former neighbor. Each testimony reminds viewers of the humiliations Arthur suffered in the first film. But the trial also becomes a stage: Arthur ends up firing his lawyer and conducting his own defense dressed as the Joker, a scene that could have been the film's triumphant climax. Phillips instead chooses to make it the moment of unmasking: Arthur cannot sustain the role, he falls apart in public, and the courtroom that admired him begins to see him as an impostor. This reversal is probably the most brilliantly constructed sequence in the film, but also the one most at odds with audience expectations. To measure the gap between this approach and the classic comics version of the Joker, a look at Alan Moore's Batman: The Killing Joke provides context for the canonical character.

💀 The nihilistic ending: Arthur Fleck is NOT the Joker

The ending of Folie à Deux has sparked endless 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, from another director. Arthur was only a precursor, an impostor, a man who accidentally lit the fire without being able to become its embodiment. This final revelation is dramatized in a last scene in which Arthur, held at Arkham, is stabbed by another inmate who gleefully proclaims that he has just killed Arthur Fleck to make way for the real Joker. The camera pulls back on the killer's smile, a man who could be the real Joker of the comics.

This ending is deeply consistent with Phillips' artistic vision. Since Alan Moore, the Joker of the comics has been a character WITHOUT a fixed origin: his past is "multiple choice," and he rejects any biography. Making Arthur Fleck "the" Joker would have set a canonical origin that contradicts the entire comics mythology. Phillips chooses consistency with the source material at the expense of the audience's emotional satisfaction. It is probably the most respectful move ever made toward the Joker mythology on screen, and also the one that most upset the fans who wanted to see Arthur become "their" definitive Joker. To understand the contrast between this deconstructive ending and the historic Joker who embodies the myth relentlessly, the analysis of Heath Ledger as the Joker lets you measure the gap between the two cinematic philosophies.

📉 An unprecedented commercial failure

The numbers for Folie à Deux are brutal. Budget: $200 million. Worldwide box office: $208 million. Profitability ratio: 1.04x (when a modern blockbuster needs to gross at least 2.5x its budget to turn a profit once marketing and distribution are deducted). Warner Bros lost several tens of millions of dollars on the operation. Worse still, the film triggered a crisis of confidence in the auteur strategy applied to DC franchises: several similar projects in development (notably a Constantine film by Phillips) were frozen or canceled in the months that followed.

This commercial downfall is the exact opposite of the 2019 triumph. The first Joker had shown that an R-rated film, with no superheroes and no franchise, could gross a billion dollars. Folie à Deux shows the opposite: that the same director, with the same actor, plus an Oscar-winning actress on top, can produce a resounding flop if the tone strays too far from audience expectations. The whole industry has taken that lesson to heart. Over 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 look at the differences between The Batman 2022 and The Dark Knight trilogy lets you measure the other cinematic paths still active.

How Warner justified the gamble

Despite the commercial failure, Warner Bros publicly defended the film as a deliberate artistic statement. The studio acknowledged that the $200 million budget was probably oversized for the actual project, which should have cost $80-100 million at most. This budget inflation is due to Phoenix's and Gaga's fees, but also to the many musical sequences, which require sets, choreography and complex 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

Critics were massively divided. A significant share of serious critics defended Folie à Deux as a courageous work that rejects the codes of the modern blockbuster. Several hailed Lady Gaga's performance as a revelation as an actress. The cinematography by Lawrence Sher (who had already shot the first film) was universally praised. But the overwhelming majority of popular critics and fans of the 2019 Joker rejected the film as a betrayal of the first one. On review aggregators, the gap between the professional critics' score and the audience score remains one of the widest of 2024.

This extreme polarization is probably the film's most lasting legacy. Folie à Deux will not be forgotten: it will be studied in film schools for decades as a textbook case. What happens when a director deliberately rejects franchise filmmaking at the peak of his success? Phillips' answer is clear: the result is a film that is artistically respectable but commercially destroyed. This ambivalent lesson is more valuable than many consensus hits.

🦇 The paradoxical legacy: a film that closed a universe by refusing to extend it

In conclusion, Joker: Folie à Deux will go down in film history as one of the most deliberate acts of artistic suicide 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 original 2019 intention. This creative integrity comes at a cost ($200 million in losses for Warner), but it protects the work from the franchise erosion that threatens every DC film success.

With Folie à Deux, the Phillips' Universe is most likely closed. Phillips has said he is not considering a third film. Phoenix has indicated that he considers Arthur Fleck a finished character. Warner is now focusing on James Gunn's new DCU and on Matt Reeves' sequel The Batman Part II. The 2019 Joker + 2024 Folie à Deux diptych will remain a standalone cinematic object, closed in on itself, free from any demand for continuity. To explore the broader context of today's DC film universes, a look at the complete chronology of Batman films and all the casts of all the Batman films provides the complete map. To understand the character these films try to embody, the complete history of the Joker in comics traces the sixty-five years of mythology behind the character 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 both characters, whether you prefer the Phoenix-Gaga or the Leto-Robbie version.

🃏 To go further: place this character within Gotham's complete criminal ecosystem by checking out the complete gallery of Batman's legendary adversaries, which brings together 36 villains ranked by tier of narrative importance.