The musical nature of Joker 2 might confirm the biggest fan theory around 2019’s Joker. After years of whispers and back and forth, the musically formatted Joker 2 is officially happening, with director Todd Phillips returning and Joaquin Phoenix poised to come back as Arthur Fleck. Joker 2, bearing the working title of Joker: Folie à Deux, will also feature Lady Gaga as Harley Quinn, and the announcement of her role led to a most unexpected revelation of the movie being a musical.
The specifics of Joker 2 as a musical still remain vague and could entail anything from a Broadway-style approach to a riff on The Rocky Horror Picture Show. However, this aspect of Joker 2 might have given a crucial tip-off without announcing it as such. In short, Joker 2 as a musical might confirm that the events of Joker never actually happened.
In Joker, Joaquin Phoenix's Arthur Fleck unintentionally becomes the face of a revolt by Gotham City’s poverty-stricken residents against the city’s wealthy classes. By the same token, the movie also clarifies that Arthur has a severe mental health condition, with his condition exacerbated when budget cuts in the city’s social services leave him without access to the medication he depends on. This would lead many to theorize that Joker’s final scene, showing Arthur in Arkham Asylum laughing at a joke and saying his therapist “wouldn’t get it,” establishes that the whole movie took place in Arthur’s head.
Making the jump from the nihilistic story of one man’s gradual transformation into a killer to a musical was jarring news for many simply in its announcement. Joker showed Arthur lamenting his struggles in his journal and making a bid as an aspiring but ultimately failed comedian - which was underscored with the potential that that was simply a delusion of Arthur’s. In this way, Phillips might portray a different fantasy in Joker 2, allowing the musical element of the movie to be much less of a sharp turn narrative-wise.
It's already verifiable that portions of Joker were delusions of Arthur’s, most notably his budding romance with his neighbor Sophie (Zazie Beetz). Despite the movie showing the pair on a date, Arthur being in Sophie’s apartment unannounced leads to the revelation that she doesn’t actually know him. With that much of the movie confirmed to be all in Arthur’s mind, many viewers have simply extrapolated that to the entirety of Joker before the Arkham Asylum ending. Joker 2 could offer the best evidence of that theory’s veracity by its inexplicable leap to a musical.
Despite the controversy ahead of its release (which arguably benefited the film), Joker became nothing less than a monster hit in 2019, with Joaquin Phoenix even winning an Oscar for his performance. With Joker 2, Phillips might tell a radically new story that outright confirms the purely imagined nature of Arthur’s story in Joker. This could even make Joker 2 the ultimate big-screen realization of the Joker’s own perspective of his origins expressed in Batman: The Killing Joke: “Sometimes I remember it one way, some times another. If I’m going to have a past, I prefer it be multiple choice.”
Joker 2 is officially in the works, and its musical format might confirm the biggest theory about the true nature of Arthur Fleck's story in Joker.Brad Curran