With the Golden Globe nominations being announced yesterday Todd Philips’s The Joker is back on the tips of many tongues.
To add to its record-breaking $1 billion global box office haul are four nominations and in mostly major categories of Picture, Director, Actor and Score), which increases the importance of the most pressing question — what’s going on with that sequel, yo?
Well if you ask Todd Phillips, the answer seems to be…probably not or maybe?
First, he says stuff like this:
“We made this movie, I pitched it to Warner Bros. as one movie. It exists in its own world. That’s it.”
That’s a very respectable and artistically valid attitude to take especially these days.
They wanted to make a stand-alone film that would be judged on its own and not how it effects or fits into a greater narrative.
But the real question isn’t one of integrity, it’s about how much money these two, nevermind Warner Brothers, could be leaving on the table.
However…he does seem to be leaving the door open should Joaquin Phoenix show any interest in returning to the role.
“I will do anything Joaquin wants to do. And I would. But the movie’s not set up to [have] a sequel. We always pitched it as one movie, and that’s it.”
I like that he’s sticking to his star here but it does seem like he may be leaving it all on the perpetually hunched yet slumping shoulders but not trying to make it seem like he is:
“If he (Joaquin) was willing to do it, and if people show up to this movie, and Warners came to us and said, ‘You know what? If you guys could think of something…’ Well, I have a feeling that he and I could think of something pretty cool.”
So what I think I’m hearing is Joaquin Phoenix is the stone this potential behemoth will pivot on which begs the question; what will it take to get him interested?
Maybe if Warner Brothers can bake up a pie sweet enough for the both of them and drizzled with incentives like maybe, hopefully, green-light some banana’s pet project of theirs we will live to see The Joker dance again.
But these, for now anyway, are all moot points as according to Phillips:
“I swear I haven’t even talked to Joaquin about that yet or what that would even be.”
The circle of logic is complete.
He never wanted a sequel but would be open to it if Phoenix was but he doesn’t know if he’s open to it because he hasn’t asked… except for that time in October.
So this is where we are. In all likelihood, there will be a sequel but as to who’s involved is anyone’s guess at this point so I’ll just leave you with a poignant bit of insight, again from the lips of Phillips:
“In the states, comic books are our Shakespeare it seems, and you can do many many versions of Hamlet,…There will be many more jokers, I’m sure in the future.”
