Five years ago, Joker's shocking ending, and instead early signs point to a flop of epic proportions that has kicked off a tsunami of outrage. At the heart of that is one question: who exactly was this movie for?

The problem with Joker: Folie à Deux, no matter how you might feel about it, is that it simply doesn't seem to care about the majority of fans most invested in a sequel. And as a result, the audience - including those who haven't and won't see it - will be completely lost on who it was even made for. So let's break down this entire mess, and why Joker 2's box office is so bad. And let's discuss the groups who might be weighing up whether to see the Joker sequel, and how it'll actually work for them.

Joker: Folie à Deux Is Very Clear About Its Thoughts On Some Original Fans

You're Harley Quinn, But That's A Bad Thing, Apparently

While the discourse has already taken the stance that ending is a provocative response to the supposedly toxic element of the original film's fanbase, it would be unfair to say everyone who liked the original liked it for that reason. It is also important to acknowledge that Joker was beloved by a lot more people who didn't see Arthur as someone to emulate, but rather someone who it was very difficult not to sympathize with. A cause in a different way.

Then there are those who enjoyed Joker and recognized the dangerous influence it would go on to have. The sequel doesn't just acknowledge the fact that the original was taken different ways, it literally creates three characters representing the split: Harley Quinn as the radical, Harvey Dent as the cynic, and Catherine Keener's Maryanne Stewart as the sympathetic viewer. The problem, really, is that there is no vagueness about who is "right" in Folie à Deux, because Phillips chose not to encourage the same sort of open interpretation as the first film embraced.

In that respect, it's important to think of "original Joker" fans as different groups, without any assumption of who is right, and who isn't. As director Todd Phillips said back in 2019, interpretation was always heartily encouraged:

“This movie requires a certain amount of participation from the audience. It’s up to you how you want to interpret it and experience it. It’s less you being kind of presented with the facts than you being presented with these possibilities.”

But then the sequel removes the choice of that participation, because Arthur is on trial, and so is the original audience. Arthur is deconstructed into a more realistic reflection of what he was always supposed to be: pathetic and worthy of pity. When you've unwittingly created an everyman hero, and made it absolutely clear that his crimes are a reaction to abuse he suffered and a society that tramples him, it's very difficult to put the genie back in the bottle.

One particularly persistent reading of the original Joker's ending took it as a comment on societal victimization, and Arthur both as a symbol for outrage and a call-to-arms. Joker was taken as a comment on how people fall through the cracks, how corrupt institutions betray the least powerful , and on mental health generally. Inevitably, some Joker fans saw the original movie as a voice for people like Arthur. People, perhaps, like them, albeit in an exaggerated way. For them to then be told that Arthur's empowerment never mattered was never going to land well, just as certain fans of Fight Club rejected the insistence that Tyler Durden was always satire.

The other camp of Joker's original fans are those who saw less of an activist message in it and more of the tragedy of how Arthur's story didn't end up belonging to him. This feels like the group Phillips himself belongs to, given how the sequel plays out, and it feels like who the intended audience really is. Whether that was an intelligent business move is a different matter, but viewed together, without the noisy discourse of the last 5 years, Joker: Folie à Deux makes perfect sense if you interpreted Joker that certain way.

We were all always supposed to accept the fact that everything that happens in Joker is Arthur's version of the events, as Todd Phillips previously revealed, when talking about Arthur as an unreliable narrator:

"It’s just the version this guy is telling in this room at a mental institution. I don’t know that he’s the most reliable narrator in the world, you know what I’m saying?”

In that respect, Joker was always just about Arthur's story, which Folie à Deux very pointedly underlines. He reclaims his story from the escalated version that his "followers" - including Harley Quinn - have chosen to believe. Todd Phillips has been accused of burning down his first movie to change how it's perceived, which is why this group of fans of the originals are currently so outraged.

Phillips is reclaiming Arthur's story, and the meaning of Joker, and it's a provocative, controversial choice. It is, however, his right as a film-maker, and it feels very much like he had his Oppenheimer moment, and made the sequel for the smallest possible audience: himself. Going from a call for open interpretation to something so closed off is jarring, even for those who enjoyed the sequel.

How DC Comics Fans Will Feel About Joker: Folie à Deux

Joker: Folie à Deux is not for DC purists, just as HBO's The Penguin is provocative in its aversion to comic book lore. Somewhat ironically, the Joker was adopted by Todd Phillips and his co-writer Scott Silver as an idea, rather than as a character to purely adapt. While Phillips always said that Alan Moore and Brian Bolland‘s “The Killing Joke” was a key inspiration, he also spoke to The LA Times in 2019 about the creative freedom that inherently came as part of Joker:

“I loved that we could take this fictional character and do what we wanted with it,” he said. “It was one of the most fun scripts to write because you were only breaking rules.”

Really, Joker was never for DC comics fans in the same way most comic book movies are, and it was a happy accident that so many of them enjoyed it. What you don't see in the original movie's reception is praise for its accurate depiction of the source material, because that was never a transaction anyone should have expected.

The same goes for Joker: Folie à Deux. It has more DC characters, thanks to the presence of Harley Quinn and Harvey Dent, but they're rough approximations: Dent is an assistant DA who cares about justice, and Harley is a devoted fan, but their adaptations have a very casual relationship with the source.

What About Harley Quinn Fans?

In 2024, Harley Quinn is a big brand. Margot Robbie's version was one of the few redeeming parts of David Ayer's Suicide Squad, and you don't have to look far to see loud calls for her to return to James Gunn's DCU after he brought her back for his own The Suicide Squad. She also has her own long-running animated series, tends to steal focus when she appears in video games (even universally derided ones), and Halloween sees countless dollars invested in recapturing her look.

With that all in mind, Joker: Folie à Deux scored a big pre-release win in announcing her part in the story. After all, what better a character to bring into a tale of dangerous idolization than the one who was literally created as Joker's chief cheerleader? Lady Gaga's version of the character is very different from the image of the abused, besotted former psychiatrist, but giving her greater agency and imagining her as a dark reflection of Arthur, rather than an active creation of him is an inspired move.

That said, Harley's comparatively limited screentime is a sticking point. She is excellent as Harley, and thoroughly believable, but for anyone wanting to engage with this new take on Harley, she's too sparsely used. For anyone wanting a pure adaptation, disappointment is assured, but it doesn't feel fair to hold her to standards that Joaquin Phoenix's radical Joker redesign wasn't subjected to. All the same, it's important to nod to the reality of the situation for some.

And What About Lady Gaga Fans?

Lady Gaga's involvement in Joker: Folie à Deux feels like a calculated decision, just as casting Oscar winners as impressive as Joaquin Phoenix and Robert De Niro first time out. But of course, Gaga is a different prospect entirely, because she has a kind of fame that movie stars can't aspire to these days: she's a pop icon with a fandom that has its own name. It might have been safe to assume that, like Swifties, Little Monsters can be depended on to come out for their hero.

To get on your level for a moment: let's just say mother ate. To phrase it for anyone older than the Internet Age, Lady Gaga is excellent, as I've already said, and complaints about her limited screentime are testament to that. She sings well, of course - though by her own ission she changed her voice to reflect the character - and her acting is great, but is this really the kind of movie Gaga fans want to see?

She's stripped back, dropped into a grim world, where a court case is the central narrative element. Perhaps I missed it, but I'm not sure that there's a lot of overlap between fans of "Bad Romance" and those of A Time To Kill. Word of mouth already also rapidly spread that she wasn't in Joker: Folie à Deux much (or enough, depending on how she was received) and this isn't her project the way A Star Is Born was back in 2018. So while she's great, it's hard to justify the idea that this movie is aimed at fans of Lady Gaga.

Is Joker: Folie à Deux For Casual Audiences? Musical Fans?

For a movie to go from a hundreds of millions of dollars prospect to a billion dollar prospect, casual general audiences have to come out to see it. But Joker: Folie à Deux flew its flag pretty high in a way that that was always going to be difficult, which is why there's so much outrage about the perception of how it alienates a lot of the original's fans.

For a start, it's rated R - not a problem for Deadpool & Wolverine, of course, but there are R-rated movies and there are R-rated movies, and it's a rating that is generally avoided because it limits audience reach. Joker and its fellow high-performing R-rated movies are exceptions, not patterns to follow. Then there's the fact that it's a musical, which immediately limits broad reach again. Unless a movie has Broadway behind it, or Disney, musicals are difficult. Combine R-rated and musical, and you have a near impossible prospect.

Yes, there are exceptions, of course, but even the best ones - Once, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and The Blues Brothers - have become great with the caveat of being cult classics. And rather problematically, Joker: Folie à Deux's status as a musical was contested by its own creators from early in the marketing campaign. Despite it being a musical. Sort of. The messaging was so confused that whatever audience exists who will come out to watch any musical wouldn't have bought in.

In general, Joker: Folie à Deux is just too odd to really capture any kind of major casual audience, possibly too provocative for its own good, and seems to revel in both points. It doesn't go far enough as a musical, and is too musical at the same time. It is a statement, but the very fact that Warner Bros ever greenlit it in its current form is a wonder that those of us who actually like it should cherish as an anomaly.

So Who Is Joker: Folie à Deux Really For, Then?

The sad reality of Joker: Folie à Deux is that it's for too few people to justify its reported $200m budget. It's a bold, shudderingly brave move by Todd Phillips that I genuinely liked a lot, but I'm not one to suggest that my opinion is right, and the many people who have crushed its Audience Score on RottenTomatoes, or the people who simply aren't coming out to see it are all wrong. I'm not being contrarian here, I liked Joker: Folie à Deux so much that I wish everyone else did.

I believe it will find an audience on streaming, and not just with the perversely fascinated, but it would be foolish not to acknowledge that the marketing campaign and the film's entire point was rather inelegantly handled. I have the sneaking suspicion that the movie has achieved exactly what it wanted to: provocation, but instead of the positive provocation inspired by its predecessor, the sequel has committed the cardinal sin of alienating its most vocal audience.

Word of mouth is important, and for all the cynicism around the gamification of box office results, that too is a conscious factor in the decision-making process of general audiences. Joker: Folie à Deux scored a record low CinemaScore of D, which is a chilling indication of how it landed with the most enthusiastic audience (those who went out to see it on release), and it's impossible to ignore all of these red flags.

Despite accusations to the contrary, I believe Joker: Folie à Deux knows exactly who it's aimed at, but that group is a very small part of what could have been its overall audience. It is simply not the movie most of its potential fans wanted it to be. And no matter what the motivation for that was, or if it was all an elaborate joke on everyone, that's a pretty catastrophic decision for the movie's business.

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