‘Joker: Folie à Deux’ director Todd Phillips says the movie features a time jump

Joker: Folie a Deux is different from its predecessor in more ways than one.

By Joe Allen Published August 20, 2024

Joker: Folie a Deux first look — Warner Bros. Pictures

It took five years, but we’re finally getting a sequel to 2019’s Joker. The movie was a wild financial and critical success, so much so that it earned star Joaquin Phoenix his first Oscar. Now, director Todd Phillips is back with Joker: Folie à Deux, and in a recent interview with Variety, he explained exactly when the movie is set.

Folie à Deux is apparently set two years after the events of Joker, which saw Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck kill his favorite late-night host live on the air. Now, Arthur has been committed to Arkham Asylum, where he’s set to meet up with Lady Gaga’s Harley Quinn. Variety also said that the movie starts with a “Looney Tunes-inspired cartoon starring the Joker.”

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

The director added that he plans to use the movie mostly as an extension of his two central characters and the relationship between them.

“Most of the music in the movie is really just dialogue,” he explained. “It’s just Arthur not having the words to say what he wants to say, so he sings them instead.”

The decision to make this sequel a musical was definitely surprising for many who saw the first film…which was not a musical.

“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,” he said, explaining that it’s not exactly a standard musical. Whatever it ends up being, Phillips has certainly got plenty of people intrigued by this sequel.

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Joe Allen is a freelance culture writer based in upstate New York. His work has been published in The Washington Post, The…

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