Joker 2 Director Todd Phillips Already Knows How You'll React To The Movie's Ending

You might have to sit with "Joker: Folie à Deux" for a minute, according to the film's director and co-writer Todd Phillips. At a pre-screening question and answer session attended by /Film ahead of the film's release, Phillips admitted that plenty of people he knows have had pretty stark reactions to the end of the new movie, and have needed a while to gather their thoughts on what they just saw.

"For the people that have seen this movie in general ... at the end, they sit and they don't move for about three to five minutes," Phillips revealed. Apparently, this doesn't just happen with people who have seen the "Joker" sequel in the director's presence, as he's said he's received messages from early viewers as well. "Then they text me, the ones that know me, or email me and go, 'I need a minute to process the movie,'" he recalled to an early audience that was about to see the film for themselves.

"I think it's going to leave you with a very unsettling ... I think it's unsettling," Phillips concluded. He also noted somewhat vaguely that the film also "clarifies a lot of things that you might have had questions about in the first movie ... I hope it all gets answered." Elsewhere in the same Q&A, Phillips got a bit more explicit about what we should make of the franchise's tenuous relationship with reality, saying, "He had a lot of fantasies in the first movie. This movie really finds Arthur, answers everything as far as, well, that movie really happened. All that stuff really happened." Phillips cites the murder of Robert De Niro's talk show host Murray Franklin and "those kids on the subway" as two events from the end of the first movie that are definitely real, though he interestingly doesn't mention the murders of Randall (Leigh Gill) and Penny (Frances Conroy).

Though Phillips says the "Joker" sequel will clarify the first film's more surreal elements, he also joked that viewers might still have some questions. "Again, if you don't understand it, email me," Phillips quipped at the press event, before concluding, "I think it'll all come together." So far, only some critics seem to agree. Early reactions to the film have been mixed, with close to two-thirds of reviews counted by Rotten Tomatoes falling on the positive side (/Film's Bill Bria gave it 8 out of 10 stars, for the record). Several reviews have alluded to the film's ending, including one from Screen Daily's Tim Grierson that asserts that "'Folie a Deux”s shocking final sequence suggests a new way of thinking about 'Joker”s cinematic legacy — as well as the ways that violence begets violence."

Meanwhile, a review from Loud and Clear calls the film "the story of a man who refuses to be anything but himself right till the very end," while IndieWire's David Ehrlich calls the conclusion a "well-telegraphed coup de grâce, the perfect finale to a sequel whose smirking ghoulishness is its only source of pleasure." Whether the end of "Joker: Folie à Deux" works or not, it seems likely that Phillips' guess that audiences will need to sit with it for a while before figuring out how to respond will prove accurate. The "Joker" discourse likely isn't going anywhere soon.

"Joker: Folie à Deux" debuts in theaters on October 4, 2024.