Lady Gaga (Harley Quinn) stares longingly at Arthur Fleck in new pic from Joker 2

With over a billion dollars made at the box office, Todd Phillips' 2019s film Joker is the higest-grossing R-rated movie of all time. The movie was a canny gamble: it's sort of a superhero film -- the Joker is Batman's greatest enemy, after all -- but not really; it was more of a gritty drama that took inspiration from Martin Scorsese movies like Mean Streets and Taxi Driver, following the maladjusted Arthur Fleck -- the man who would become Joker -- as he hits several emotional low points and finally snaps, killing a talk show host on the air and inspiring chaos in Gotham City.

The sequel movie, Joker: Folie à Deux, will pick up where the first film left off: with Arthur in an insane asylum. He'll meet a new character: Harley Quinn, who in Batman lore is Joker's therapist before falling in love with him and becoming a clown-themed criminal herself. In the new movie, which is supposedly a musical, she'll be played by Lady Gaga.

The other day, director Todd Phillips dropped a couple of new images from the new movie as a Christmas treat. The first gives us a glimpse of the Joker (Joaquin Pheonix) in his cell at Arkham Asylum. The second features Harley quin gazing adoringly at him in what looks like a courtroom:

The first Joker movie inspired a lot of discourse about violence, incels, and the like, to the point where some worried it might inspire unrest in the real world. Of course, that only made the buzz around the film louder, leading to its historic box office success.

There's also a lot of heat around this new movie, if for no other reason than because of how audacious it is; making the sequel a musical and casting one of the biggest pop stars of our time in a key role is, at minimum, bold. We'll see the risks pay off when Joker: Folie à Deux comes out in theaters on October 4 of next year.

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