Note: This is an ending explainer. Spoilers for the ending of Joker: Folie à Deux. Todd Phillips’s Joker didn’t have all that much to say besides “don’t be mean to socially awkward men, you never know what they’re going through and you might just push them to the point of turning into some kind of a Joker.
” The most interesting thing about it, and maybe this is a generous reading, was how it got to the banality of evil by suggesting that our biggest boogeymen aren’t agents of some incredible genius and ambition, hoping to wrack their grand plans and ideologies on the rest of us; more often, they are dumb, and losers. And it’s not just scary, but also sad. It was a new kind of supervillain origin story .
.. .
.. Or it was, until Phillips’s confused, self-loathing follow-up, Joker: Folie à Deux , retconned much of the first film’s characterization, and rug-pulled its entire place and purpose in the DC Cinematic Universe.
In the new film’s final minutes, it’s revealed that this person we’ve been watching for the past two-and-a-half hours, and the two hours before that in the previous movie, was never the Joker at all. At least, he was never the Joker who fights Batman. He was, as he insists to his followers’ and Lady Gaga’s dismay, just Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix) all along.
The sequel ends with Arthur’s death by stabbing, making Arthur just Some Additional Guy the Joker Had Beef With, because the guy doing the stabbing is implied to be, yeah.