Before It Became A Movie, Joker 2 Could've Been A Broadway Musical

If the idea of "Joker 2" as a Broadway musical sounds absolutely wild or even upsetting to you, that's fair. Just know that director Todd Phillips actually considered this as a possibility — before logistics got in the way.

In an interview with Variety about the upcoming sequel "Joker: Folie á Deux," Phillips — an Oscar nominee for the first film — said that he and star Joaquin Phoenix thought about bringing Arthur Fleck's next adventure to the stage, but reconsidered when they thought about whether or not Phoenix would actually want to commit to such a thing. "When we started really thinking about it, we realized it takes four years to put something like that together. And is Joaquin really going to give six months of his life to do that every night onstage?" Phillips told the outlet. "Then we thought about doing it at [the Carlyle, a famous New York hotel that sometimes hosts performances] as sort of a smaller thing. But COVID hit."

It's easy to see how the urge to put "Joker 2" onstage in New York resulted in "Joker: Folie á Deux," a musical film that features multiple performances from Phoenix (who picked up his first-ever Academy Award for playing Arthur in the first movie) and his new co-star Lady Gaga, who portrays Harleen "Lee" Quinzel. Even though he's been kicking this idea around for quite some time, Phillips did admit he's intimidated by the potential reaction to a musical "Joker" movie.

Lady Gaga, who spoke to Variety about "Joker: Folie á Deux" and the sheer scale of its ambition, spoke to the film's creativity — and attributed it all to Todd Phillips' vision for the sequel. "Todd took a very big swing with this whole concept and with the script, giving the sequel to 'Joker' this audacity and complexity," Gaga revealed. "There's music, there's dance, it's a drama, it's also a courtroom drama, it's a comedy, it's happy, it's sad. It's a testament to [Todd] as a director, that he would rather be creative than just tell a traditional story of love."

Still, Phillips wanted to be quite clear about what kind of "musical movie" the "Joker" sequel is: As he put it, the music serves to move the narrative along rather than interrupting it (making it a more diegetic style, meaning that the musical numbers may be acknowledged by other characters within the story). "Most of the music in the movie is really just dialogue," Phillips said. "It's just Arthur not having the words to say what he wants to say, so he sings them instead." 

Basically, don't worry — "Joker: Folie á Deux" isn't a regular musical. It's a cool 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," Phillips continued before clarifying, "No disrespect, because I loved 'In the Heights.'"

The whole point of this feature seems to be that, with "Joker: Folie á Deux," Todd Phillips is making an attempt to push Arthur Fleck's story even further than he did in the 2019 movie. "The question became, 'how can we top ourselves?'" Phillips mused. "And you can only do that if you do something dangerous. But there were days on set where you'd look around and think, 'Holy f***ing sh**! What did we do?'"

Obviously, adding Lady Gaga to the mix goes a long way when it comes to upping the "Joker" ante, particularly because the singer-songwriter turned actress is well-known at this point for hurling herself headfirst into her roles (like the time she lived as Patrizia Reggiani for "House of Gucci"). Alongside Gaga, whose Harleen begins the story as a music therapist at Arkham Asylum, the movie brings Zazie Beetz back as Arthur's neighbor Sophie Dumond and adds Catherine Keener, Brendan Gleeson, "Industry" breakout Harry Lawtey, and Steve Coogan to the cast as well. 

Overall, Phillips wants to create absolute cinematic chaos with this sequel. "The goal of this movie is to make it feel like it was made by crazy people," he said. "The inmates are running the asylum." We'll get to see what all the fuss is about when "Joker: Folie á Deux" releases on October 4, 2024.