Joker: Folie à Deux director promises this is his last DC movie (which he said last time)

The new movie Joker: Folie à Deux opens this weekend, and if people like this sequel half as much as they liked the 2019 original movie, Joker, we could be in for a loud couple of weeks. The first starred Joaquin Phoenix as the Clown Prince of Crime, only not really, because he's technically a new guy named Arthur Fleck and Batman only shows up very tangentially. The movie is set in Gotham City, but still stands very much on its own. The new movie is more of the same, with director Todd Phillips drafting pop superstar Lady Gaga to play the Joker's comic book girlfriend Harley Quinn, but it'll probably be a different version of Harley than a lot of fans have come to know.

It's a delicate dance Phillips and his cast are engaged in. Making a sequel almost seems like tempting fate, but Phillips explained to NPR that he simply wasn't finished after making the first movie. "Oftentimes ... as much as we enjoy making a movie, you're kind of at the end counting down the days for it to be done," Phillips says. "But on the first Joker, Joaquin and I didn't want it to end."

And so the idea of Folie à Deux was born. The new movie builds off the surreal dance sequences from the first to become a proper musical, which is where Gaga comes in. But it still has the angsty, anti-establishment spirit of the original. "Movies tend to hold a mirror in general," Phillips mused. "The judicial system is corrupt, the media is corrupt in this movie. ... It's also about the corruption of entertainment."

That said, after this, Phillips promises he's done making Joker movies; he may be ready to return to something like The Hangover franchise, the movies that originally made him famous. "The end of this year's probably going to be wild. And it does feel like everybody just needs to calm down and laugh again. I am ready to make another comedy, I think. I think that's what the world needs." There are no plans to make a solo Harley Quinn movie, for example. “It’s not really where this movie is headed for me. I feel like my time in the DC Universe was these two films,” he told The Hollywood Reporter.

Granted, that's more or less what Phillips said after the first Joker movie came out, and he was pretty honest about what changed. “A movie doesn’t make a billion dollars and they don’t talk about a sequel,” he said at the time.

So maybe whether or not Phillips makes another gritty, experimental Batman-adjacent movie will depend on how well Joker: Folie à Deux does at the box office. He and Phoenix, at least, are making a lot more for the second movie (which cost $200 million to make) than the first (which cost $55 million), and I'm sure that's a factor as well.

We'll find out soon enough. Joker: Folie à Deux opens in theaters tomorrow, October 3!

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