Joker was envisioned as a stand-alone story about a failed stand-up comedian who descends into a life of crime and chaos in Gotham City. But upon its release in 2019, it became the first R-rated movie to gross more than $1 billion at the box office, as well as the most decorated comic book movie ever made, by virtue of 11 Oscar nominations (including two wins) and the prestigious Golden Lion award at the Venice International Film Festival. Regardless of what you think of the divisive, controversial film, Joker was a stunning success for Warner Bros. Pictures and the DC Comics brand.
Given all the rewards reaped from a movie that cost only $55 million to make, a sequel was perhaps always inevitable—and Joker star Joaquin Phoenix and director Todd Phillips were both on board for it. But how do you build on a film that succeeded thanks in large part to its element of surprise?
“The question became, ‘How can we top ourselves?’” Phillips told Variety in August. “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 fucking shit! What did we do?’”
The Ringer’s Streaming Guide
There’s a lot of TV out there. We want to help: Every week, we’ll tell you the best and most urgent shows to stream so you can stay on top of the ever-expanding heap of Peak TV.
Phillips’s “dangerous” follow-up, Joker: Folie à Deux, has been almost as remarkable a failure as its predecessor was a success. The Joker sequel, which was released on Friday, earned just $40 million in the U.S. over its opening weekend, well below projections of $50 million to $65 million and less than half of what Joker grossed in its massive $96 million opening debut five years ago. Worse still, Folie à Deux reportedly had a budget of $200 million, with Phoenix, costar Lady Gaga, and Phillips alone costing the studio more than $50 million, according to Puck’s Matthew Belloni. The film sports a putrid critics’ score of 33 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, and it became the first Hollywood comic book movie ever to earn a “D” CinemaScore from audiences.
Although Folie à Deux opened bigger overseas, its bloated budget leaves it with a lot of ground to make up in order to break even, and word of mouth won’t be kind to it. The Joker sequel will almost certainly go down as a colossal flop. And now that Phillips has confirmed that a third installment won’t be happening, the Joker franchise is coming to a bitter end. Considering all the controversy and hysteria that surrounded Joker’s release in 2019, and the divergent receptions the film and its sequel received, the franchise will surely leave behind a complicated legacy. Together, the two Joker films—along with HBO’s The Penguin—show the risk and reward of DC Studios’ new Elseworlds approach, with Folie à Deux now raising plenty of questions for the company as DC Studios cohead James Gunn continues to map out its new era of entertainment.
Folie à Deux has arrived during a critical transition period for Warner Bros. and DC Studios, as Gunn and cohead Peter Safran attempt to revive the DC brand after the messy Snyderverse era. The new DCU will launch when the animated series Creature Commandos premieres in December, with Gunn’s Superman following next summer as the first live-action film. When Gunn and Safran showcased what the next generation of DC films and TV shows would look like in January 2023, they discussed the lack of organization in DC’s previous era and how they planned to do things differently, such as by branding projects that fall outside DC’s main continuity as “Elseworlds” stories.
“The DCU’s a multiverse, but we’re going to be focusing on one universe from that multiverse,” Safran explained. “And if something isn’t DCU, we’re going to make that very clear. So, strictly adult fare like Todd Phillips’s Joker, or kids animation like Teen Titans Go!, we’re going to make it very clear that those are DC Elseworlds, just the same way that they do it in the comic books.”
The Elseworlds premise does indeed have a rich history in the comics, where it gives free rein to writers and artists to reimagine DC’s iconic characters in bold new ways, such as a version of Batman who fights Jack the Ripper in a Victorian-era Gotham or a version of Superman who grows up in Communist Russia instead of Smallville. While applying this concept to film and TV sounds good in theory, the new Elseworlds branding has been anything but clear.
Although Folie à Deux was previously described as being one of the first Elseworlds projects, the film doesn’t even feature the DC Studios logo in its opening credits, let alone any Elseworlds signage. And that’s because DC Studios had no direct impact on the film, according to Phillips at a prescreening Q&A in September. “With all due respect to [Gunn and Safran],” the director said, “this is kind of a Warner Brothers movie, and that’s them also wanting it to be like, ‘OK, Todd did his thing. Let Todd continue to do his thing.’”
Gunn also distanced DC Studios from any involvement in Folie à Deux, telling fans on Threads that “it’s not a DC Studios film,” in addition to his previous comments about how the new DCU Elseworlds intro “won’t debut until the films we’ve worked on.” It’s all rather confusing and dissonant with everything the new DC Studios heads previously discussed about how things would be more organized under their leadership. On the other hand, considering just how badly Folie à Deux is performing so far, it may be a good thing for Gunn and Co. to be able to pin this whole mess on Warner Bros. and preserve their new Elseworlds and DC Studios branding for their own projects.
Irrespective of how Joker and Folie à Deux have been officially labeled by Warner Bros. and DC, these films still epitomize the new Elseworlds approach that the studio has been relying on until Gunn’s new cinematic universe finally gets underway. Elseworlds movies and TV shows are designed to allow individual filmmakers greater creative control to bring their own visions of DC characters and stories to life, without the studio having to worry about how those releases affect the interconnected universe being built in the new DCU. And while I was not a fan of it, Joker is undeniably one of the most successful—and profitable—comic book movies ever made, largely due to the freedom Phillips was given.
Joker was inspired by ’70s and ’80s crime dramas, particularly Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy, and it subverts much of what we’ve come to expect from projects based on superhero IP. Its connections to Gotham City and its infamous Clown Prince of Crime are nominal. The 2019 film’s most direct references to the main Batman mythology come through its incorporation of the Wayne family, most notably when Arthur Fleck travels to Wayne Manor and encounters a young Bruce Wayne. The meeting between the future archenemies was confusing at the time of Joker’s release and has become all the more confusing in hindsight. In a recent interview with IGN, Phillips tried to clear up any lingering questions about the scene:
One of the things that people never understood about the first movie was, “I don’t get it. He visits Bruce Wayne and he’s 30 years older than Bruce Wayne. What kind of geriatric Joker is going to fight in the future?” I don’t know if you’ve ever saw [sic] the script of the first movie. The first film is called Joker. It’s not called “The Joker,” it’s called Joker. And the first film under the script always said “An origin story.” Never said the origin story. It was this idea that maybe this isn’t the Joker. Maybe this is the inspiration for the Joker. So, in essence at the end of this movie, the thing you’re being left with is “Wait, what is that thing happening behind him? Is that the guy?”
That all sounds a bit more like an admission of cheap marketing tactics to mislead DC fans than any sort of clever creative conceit, but Folie à Deux does illustrate the director’s clear preference to stray from the Batman mythology—and, more importantly, the Joker mythology—in his films as much as possible. The Joker sequel similarly has only a few tenuous connections to the world of the Caped Crusader: Assistant district attorney Harvey Dent (Harry Lawtey) appears opposite Arthur in court as the lead prosecutor in the latter’s criminal trial, and his face gets partially burned by the end of the movie in reference to his future as Two-Face; Lady Gaga’s Harley Quinn, who’s referred to as Lee Quinzel, has been mostly reimagined to be more grounded to fit into Phillips’s version of Gotham; and Wayne Tower is shown in passing at one point, but Bruce is nowhere to be seen after the murder of his parents at the end of the first film.
Crucially, Folie à Deux also eliminates any possibility that Arthur will ever become the criminal mastermind Batman has fought in the comics and on-screen for decades. At the climax of the film, a wavering Arthur Fleck—his face caked in clown makeup as he represents himself in court—confesses that there isn’t any Joker to blame his crimes on, only himself. The scene feels like a direct attempt by Phillips, perhaps disillusioned by all those viewers who misunderstood his original film (and the semantics of its marketing), to set the record straight that Arthur isn’t the Joker, just some messed-up guy whose five minutes of fame end with him getting shanked in prison.
Joker transcended the issues of its confusing connection to Batman lore and its flouting of the audience’s expectations for the Joker character, but Folie à Deux is just too much of a mess to overcome those questions. The decision to turn this sequel into a musical-slash-courtroom-drama is baffling, especially considering that the film followed Hollywood’s bizarre trend of hiding the fact that it was a musical in its trailers. It sounds like Warner Bros. gave Phillips even more creative control in this movie after the success of Joker, and, according to Belloni in a recent Puck newsletter, the studio didn’t even test screen Folie à Deux to get audience feedback before Phillips locked the film. As Phillips told Variety, “the goal of this movie is to make it feel like it was made by crazy people; the inmates are running the asylum.” In light of the final result, Warner might have afforded Phillips too much creative control this time around.
Even as Folie à Deux struggles out of the gate, HBO’s The Penguin has been greeted by glowing reviews and strong viewership numbers after taking a more conventional yet still distinct approach with another notorious Batman villain. The series, a spinoff of Matt Reeves’s The Batman, is in a similar position as a somewhat unofficial Elseworlds project, except the TV show actually flashes the new DC Studios logo at the end of its episodes.
Reeves, who serves as an executive producer on showrunner Lauren LeFranc’s series, has had a lot of success in the creation of his own Batverse. And the timing of The Batman franchise’s development, between the Snyderverse era and Gunn’s new DCU, has led to its retroactive designation as Elseworlds out of necessity more than anything else. Gunn has his own plans for Batman (and Robin) in his interconnected universe, so separating Reeves’s stories into their own universe allows both to exist in tandem. With The Batman Part II scheduled for October 2, 2026, well into the new DC Studios era, Reeves’s follow-up will presumably be the first film to boast more clearly defined Elseworlds branding. The Superman movie from Ta-Nehisi Coates and J.J. Abrams that’s long been in the works would, too, if it ever gets made.
(It’s also possible that ongoing TV shows that predate Gunn and Safran’s hiring, such as Teen Titans Go! or Harley Quinn, could be relabeled as Elseworlds releases before then, when DC Studios eventually decides to distinguish these universes from one another more clearly, as promised.)
The Penguin, as an extension of The Batman, seems to exist outside the upcoming DCU as a strategic decision, to give Gunn the space to make even more Batman. Even so, the series seems like an example of what successful Elseworlds projects could be. While the show builds on the events of Reeves’s 2022 film, it’s really a crime drama that aims to be more like The Sopranos than a traditional superhero story. By centering its narrative on the likes of the Penguin and Sofia Falcone, the series is setting aside Gotham’s typical protagonist to develop these “villains” into more nuanced and dynamic characters.
The Batman, The Penguin, and Joker are wins for DC—although only the first of those was really recognizable as DC IP—but Folie à Deux’s performance is more reminiscent of the leftover films from the previous DC Films regime, like 2023’s The Flash and Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom. All in all, this transition phase has been costly and extremely inconsistent for a studio that’s desperate to move on from its era of expensive, uneven releases. The brand continues to be damaged by releases like Folie à Deux, and the average consumer may not even notice that the new DC Studios period has begun until the Elseworlds designation is applied more coherently.
While the path to a clean, studio-wide reboot gets more complicated, the success of Joker, The Batman, and The Penguin—along with the failure of Folie à Deux—has given Gunn and Safran plenty to think about as DC Elseworlds becomes a bigger component of their wider release strategy and they work with new filmmakers who have unique ideas. At the very least, it’s probably safe to say that we won’t be seeing too many other superhero-musical-courtroom-dramas in this universe or any other in the years to come.
