It looks like the Clown Prince of Crime is coming back…
Ever since Joker arrived in cinemas in 2019, there has been pretty much non-stop discussion about the potential for a sequel.
Costing very little ($55 million) compared to your regular comic book movie (Justice League cost $300 million), it went on to make over a billion at the box office, and was nominated for 11 Oscars including Best Picture, and Joaquin Phoenix actually took the Best Actor trophy home for his performance.
So it was, in short, a success.
But it was also mostly considered to be a one-and-done movie, with writer/director Todd Phillips saying at the time that this would be a singular tangent by DC and Warner Bros., especially since they had Jared Leto still playing the character in Justice League, and it is probably fair to assume that 2022’s The Batman may be setting up its own version of Joker, too.
However, buried deep in The Hollywood Reporter‘s article on Hollywood’s Most Popular Lawyers, in a write-up under Warren Dern and his famous clients, the following line appears: “Todd Phillips struck a deal to co-write the next Joker instalment.”
This is the first piece of actual evidence that Joker 2 was in any sort of active development, with Phillips return to write but apparently not direct the sequel. We can probably safely assume that DC and WB will throw all of the money in the world at Joaquin Phoenix to get him back in the title role, too.
Phillips may not be returning to the director’s chair as he’s currently working on a Hulk Hogan biopic, with Chris Hemsworth playing the legendary wrestler.
Although, we could start reading too much into that singular sentence, with the use of the word “instalment” instead of “sequel”. Famously, the Joker has no one singular origin story, so could it be that Phillips is going down that route here, giving us a completely different actor going through a completely different plot?
We’ll likely have a few years of heavy speculating before we get any kind of actual answer… and we’ll enjoy every minute of it!
LISTEN: You Must Be Jokin’ with Aideen McQueen – Faith healers, Coolock craic and Gigging as Gaeilge
