Joker: Folie à Deux isn’t a musical, according to director Todd Phillips. It’s just the sort of movie where characters burst out singing and dancing, multiple times throughout the film because they can’t figure out how to express their feelings otherwise… Which is, you know, the textbook definition of a musical.
This particular bit of news comes during a lengthy profile of the “twisted” Todd Phillips in Variety, where they lay out a bunch of details about the upcoming sequel. It kicks off with a Looney Tunes-style animated sequence crafted by Sylvain Chomet. And thanks to the addition of Harleen “Lee” Quinzel (Lady Gaga), The Joker, aka Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix) gets sucked into MGM-style musical numbers. Those include covers like “Get Happy,” “For Once in My Life” and “That’s Life,” and reportedly there are original songs as well. Per Variety, Fleck sings love ballads, and Quinzel leans towards songs about power.
But according to Phillips, he doesn’t necessarily want it to be labeled a musical. “Most of the music in the movie is really just dialogue,” said Phillips. “It’s just Arthur not having the words to say what he wants to say, so he sings them instead.”
This is particularly funny to me because that’s almost word for word how my directing professor in college defined musicals. Anyway, Phillips continues to dig a hole for himself by adding, “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. No disrespect, because I loved ‘In the Heights.’”
None taken. If I were to offer some advice, it might be helpful for Phillips to watch more musicals than just In the Heights? Because they take all shapes and forms. There are plenty of musicals where one person sings, two people sing, there’s dialogue, or there’s not. Not to get too gloom and doom, but this is starting to feel a bit like Joker. That professed to be a ’70s, gritty-style paranoid thriller… But really was based on Phillips having seen Taxi Driver and King of Comedy too many times. Here, he seems bent on not defining it as a musical — I would guess — mostly because audiences have roundly rejected musicals at the box office for the last few years. Instead, this is a serious drama about two clowns who happen to sing but it is not a musical. No sir.
Joker: Folie à Deux hits theaters on October 4, 2024.
