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 undermined 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 Best Actor Oscar. The pressure was immense. Yet, against all expectations, Phillips and Phoenix delivered not a blockbuster replicating the 2019 formula, but a musical courtroom drama that methodically dismantled everything that made the first film a success. The result: $208 million at the global box office on a $200 million budget — one of the biggest commercial failures in recent DC cinematic history, and probably Hollywood's most deliberate artistic suicide in two decades.

This article explores 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 courtroom narrative structure, the numerous musical sequences that transform the film into a quasi-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' post-Oscar gamble: rejecting the classic blockbuster

When Warner Bros commissioned Todd Phillips for a sequel after the 2019 triumph, the studio expected a blockbuster replicating the first film's formula: dark tone, social drama, intense acting performance, violent climax on a Gotham street. Any calculating filmmaker would have done so. 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 in the first film, who meets a young woman obsessed with him, and who spends the film singing his fantasies as his trial collapses 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 retreats into musical fantasies where he and Lee form a perfect couple. This narrative technique is inspired by 1970s art-house cinema and some Bob Fosse classics. The problem is that it demands a patience from the audience that the film's marketing had not prepared for. Fans of 2019's Joker 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: the character's total reinvention

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

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 comes from a wealthy family). She uses him to vicariously experience the transgression she doesn't dare commit herself. And she abandons him in the end when she realizes he is not the myth she imagined but a mundane, sick man. This character construction is a deeply cynical reading of modern fan culture — Lee embodies the audience itself, who projects a greatness they don't possess onto famous criminals. To compare with Margot Robbie's version, which embraces the traditional love-codependency dynamic, the analysis Who played Harley Quinn in Suicide Squad provides context for previous cinematic incarnations.

The chemistry that didn't click in theaters

Despite the caliber of the two actors (Phoenix Oscar winner 2020, Gaga Oscar winner 2019 for A Star Is Born), the on-screen chemistry between Phoenix and Gaga deeply divided audiences. 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. Whatever the camp, the commercial result was unforgiving: the film failed to find its audience. Fans of 2019's Joker were disappointed by the tone. Musical fans didn't come to see a "comics" film. Auteur cinephiles remained cautious. Three potential audiences, none 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, 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 aid cuts, 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 takes over his own defense disguised as the Joker, a scene that could have been the film's triumphant climax. Phillips, however, chooses to make it the moment of revelation: Arthur doesn't hold the role, he publicly collapses, and the audience who 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 public expectations. To gauge the difference between this approach and the classic comic book version of the Joker, a detour to 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 sparked much debate. It reveals something no one in the audience expected: Arthur Fleck is not the real Joker. The true Joker is yet to come, in another film, by another director. Arthur was merely a precursor, an impostor, a man who accidentally started a fire 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 in proclaiming that he has just killed Arthur Fleck to make way for the true 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 comic book Joker, ever since Alan Moore, is a character WITHOUT a fixed origin — his past is "multiple choice," he rejects any biography. Making Arthur Fleck "the" Joker would have established a canonical origin that would contradict the entire 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 numbers for Folie à Deux are brutal. Budget: $200 million. Worldwide box office: $208 million. Profitability ratio: 1.04x (whereas a modern blockbuster film needs to make at least 2.5x its budget to be profitable after marketing and distribution 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 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, without superheroes, without a franchise, could gross a billion dollars. Folie à Deux proves the opposite: that the same director, with the same actor, with the same Oscar-winning actress in addition, can produce a resounding failure if the tone deviates too much from public 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 understand the broader context of this crisis in DC cinema, a detour to the differences between The Batman 2022 and The Dark Knight trilogy allows us to 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 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 is due to the fees for 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

Critics were massively divided. A significant portion of serious critics defended Folie à Deux as a courageous work that rejected the codes of modern blockbusters. Several praised Lady Gaga's performance as a revelation. Lawrence Sher's cinematography (who also shot the first film) was universally lauded. But the overwhelming majority of popular critics and fans of 2019's Joker rejected the film as a betrayal of the first. On review aggregators, the discrepancy between professional critical scores and public scores remains one of the most pronounced 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 case study: what happens when a director deliberately rejects franchise filmmaking at the height of its success? Phillips' answer is clear: the result is an artistically respectable but commercially destroyed film. This ambivalent lesson is more valuable than many consensual successes.