Joker 2 director Todd Phillips has weighed in on a question everyone's been asking since the movie was released in 2019: what would Joaquin Phoenix's Arthur Fleck make of Batman? "I think Arthur would be in awe of the alpha male that is Batman. I really do. I think Arthur would look up and appreciate it," Phillips told IGN .
"I think he'd be in awe of that." Although Bruce Wayne does exist in the version of Gotham City that Arthur lives in, he's not Batman – not yet, anyway. "I think Arthur always had a fascination with men at ease, and he is not a man at ease.
Murray Franklin in the first movie was a man at ease," Phillips continued. "He probably saw the guys he worked with as men at ease, and that was the one thing that Arthur could never be was a man at ease." In the upcoming Joker sequel, officially titled Joker: Folie à Deux, Arthur will instead come face to face with another iconic comic book character: Harley Quinn, played by Lady Gaga.
The movie's title is a French term that translates to "shared madness" and is also used to refer to a psychiatric syndrome in which symptoms of a delusional belief, and sometimes hallucinations, are transferred from one person to another. Alongside Phoenix and Gaga, the sequel's cast also includes Brendan Gleeson, Catherine Keener, Harry Lawtey, and Steve Coogan, while Zazie Beetz returns as Sophie, her character from the first Joker movie. Joker: Folie à Deux arrives on the big screen on October 4.
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