Warner Bros. have released the teaser trailer for Joker: Folie à Deux (“madness for two“), the musical sequel to Todd Phillips’s 2019 Oscar winner Joker, starring Joaquin Phoenix as ’80s era Joker Arthur Fleck, and Lady Gaga as Harley Quinn. The studio warns “the following content may contain topics related to suicide or self-harm,” so viewer discretion is advised.
The sequel picks up with Arthur now living in Arkham State Hospital, where he befriends Gaga’s Quinn, who wants to escape, and reawaken his old demons. It leans more heavily into the idea Arthur was hallucinating much of what was going on in the first film, with overtly surreal imagery like the character being pursued in the streets by his murderous alter-ego, alongside the elaborate musical imagery.
Conspicuously, despite the imagery and emphasis on music therapy, the characters aren’t shown bursting into song, which for better or worse, has become a recent phenomenon in trailers for musicals, that extends to other recent and upcoming Warner Bros. releases like Wonka, The Color Purple, and Wicked. A Ringer article on the trend last year noted it was likely rooted in the disappointing reception towards musicals like In the Heights or Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story, and market research showing non-musical fans were more likely to be pleasantly surprised if they go into a movie not knowing it is one.
What the trailer does reveal is an appearance from British comedy legend Steve Coogan (aka Alan Partridge) as someone apparently performing a psychiatric assessment of Arthur, as well as a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it glimpse of Irish actor Brendan Gleeson as one of Fleck’s guards. Other previously disclosed cast members like Zazie Beetz (reprising her role as Arthur’s neighbor Sophie Dumond, or possibly another hallucination of her), Catherine Keener, Jacob Lofland, Ken Leung and Harry Lawtey are not shown in the trailer.
Featuring a score by Hildur Guðnadóttir (who won an Academy Award for the first film), Joker: Folie à Deux will be released in theaters on October 4, 2024. Along with this fall’s The Batman spin-off series The Penguin, it should be sure to tide over Batman movie fans until the release of The Batman Part II on October 2, 2026, and the introduction of the DC Studios incarnation in The Brave and the Bold (which does not have a release date at the time of writing.)
