JOKER: FOLIE A DEUX Not A Musical?

Have we all just made an assumption that is wrong? How exactly did the world decide that Joker: Folie a Deux will be a musical? We probably just heard the story that it unfolds almost entirely within Gotham City’s Arkham Asylum and has musical elements, and we filled in the rest ourselves.

Then Lady Gaga joined the cast as Harley Quinn, and we thought “Ahhh, a singer!” so this did nothing to dissuade us. Then somebody dropped that Francis Ford Coppola’s musical One from the Heart has served as a visual inspiration and we simply kept on building.

So is it? Well, apparently not, according to the film’s director of photography Lawrence Sher. He was participating in an online Masterclass in France, where he confirmed it is not a musical, it is just a film that had music in it and it is not too different from the first movie.

“Its got some music. It’s not a musical per se, but it’s like.. it just has music in it, that’s all. Music is a part of the movie and the characters, but I don’t know if it’s a musical. But yes, there is music.

But there’s a lot of music in the first ‘Joker’ too. There’s like… there was actually like things that we didn’t do in the first Joker that to some extent are part of the DNA of the second one.”

So expect more sequences like the steps scene, but don’t go in expecting a full-on chorus line, right?

“You know how in the first Joker he’s like watching Charlie Chaplin and he has like a little music in him right you know the way you know the dancing on the steps and all that kind of stuff there were some things we shot that were cut out but that there was a little Charlie Chaplin this to his kind of just being a little bit of a clown and a little bit of this whole thing so some of that same idea of music being really prevalent is more of a continuation of Joker than something new.”

The first movie joins the elite group of R-rated movies to earn over $1 billion. Others are Oppenheimer and the Deadpool movies. Phoenix grabbed the Best Actor Oscar for the movie. All this was unexpected.

Zazie Beetz, Catherine Keener, Brendan Gleeson, and Jacob Lofland co-star in the new movie which lands on October 4th.

Phillips shared some new images via his Instagram on Valentine’s Day.