This article contains major spoilers for Joker: Folie À Deux.
Joker director Todd Phillips has opened up about Folie À Deux’s shock ending.
The new sequel stars Joaquin Phoenix and Lady Gaga, taking viewers on a two-hour journey that’s part jukebox musical, part gritty prison movie, part courtroom drama and part dystopian political satire.
After all of that, the film ends on a shocking note with Joaquin’s Arthur Fleck being killed by a fellow patient, credited simply as Young Inmate in Arkham, who tells him a nonsensical joke before stabbing him repeatedly in the stomach.
This unidentified patient, played by Connor Storrie, then goes on to mutilate his own face while laughing off screen, suggesting that he is actually the Joker character known in the Batman comics, instead of Arthur, as had previously been assumed.
Grim, right?
During an interview with IGN, Todd confirmed this theory to be the case, revealing the scene was partly inspired by one major criticism of the first Joker film in which Joaquin encounters Bruce Wayne as a young boy.
“One of the things that people never understood about the first movie was, ‘I don’t get it. He visits Bruce Wayne and he’s 30 years older than Bruce Wayne. What kind of geriatric Joker is going to fight in the future?’,” the filmmaker said.
“I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the script of the first movie. The first film is called Joker. It’s not called The Joker, it’s called Joker.”
Todd continued: “The first film under the script always said ‘An origin story’. It never said the origin story. It was this idea that maybe this isn’t the Joker. Maybe this is the inspiration for the Joker.
“So, in essence at the end of this movie, the thing you’re being left with is ‘Wait, what is that thing happening behind him? Is that the guy?’.”
Meanwhile, Todd also confirmed to Entertainment Weekly that a scene towards the end of the film in which Harvey Dent’s face is disfigured in the courtroom bombing is intended as a new origin story for the Batman villain Two Face.
“All we’re doing is saying, let’s use this lore as a foundation, but run it through a realistic lens, or at least a different lens than it’s been run through in other things, to make it our own,” he said, claiming that Industry actor Harry Lawtey is “playing the character before that character” in Folie À Deux.
Joker: Folie À Deux is in cinemas now.