Joker fans feel the film didn't get what it deserves: it lost in the Best Motion Picture - Drama category at the 77th Golden Globe Awards, where the Sam Mendes-directed 1917 was awarded the night's top prize as voted by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. Joker and war drama 1917 competed for the award against a trio of acclaimed Netflix originals: Martin Scorsese's gangster epic The Irishman, Noah Baumbach's relationship drama Marriage Story, and Fernando Meirelles' biographical dramaThe Two Popes. Despite Joker's loss in the Best Picture category and Phillips' loss to Mendes for Best Director, Joker won two of its four nominations: Best Original Score for composer Hildur Guðnadóttir and Best Actor for Joaquin Phoenix.
Nominees for the Best Picture prize included Phillips and fellow producers Emma Tillinger Koskoff and Bradley Cooper.
"Todd called me and said, 'I have this crazy idea for this sort of alternate version of DC, and the first one is the origin story of Joker,'" Cooper said of his decision to board a DC Comics film as a producer in making-of documentary Joker: Vision & Fury. "I thought, 'This is just so bold.'"
Cooper, who previously served as producer on Phillips' War Dogs, called Joker a "wonderful exploration" of the iconic Batman villain, depicted as a struggling stand up comic portrayed by Joaquin Phoenix in a Golden Globe-nominated performance.
"To take, probably, the most famous two-dimensional villain who we've watched just wreak havoc in so many forms — whether it's the comic book, a television series, or various films — to say, 'Okay, what happens if we humanize this person? And let's see what could be the possible causes,'" Cooper said.
Phillips is both an auteur and "viciously smart," added Cooper, who noted the filmmaker possesses a "willingness to just go outside of any boundary and tell the story that he wants to tell."
For his part, Phillips professed a love for "bad guys."
"It's fun to say, 'Why is he like that? What made him like that?' And that's ultimately the goal of the movie," Phillips said. "It's not this gigantic statement on the world today, and there is stuff thematically in there, but really, it's 'What makes somebody that way?' And the Joker, I just liked his sense of mayhem and chaos."
Earlier in January, Phillips said he and Phoenix are "open" to revisiting the world of Joker for a sequel.
"When a movie does $1 billion and cost $60 million to make, of course it comes up," Phillips said during an event hosted by Deadline. "But Joaquin and I haven't really decided on it. We're open. I mean, I'd love to work with him on anything, quite frankly. So who knows? But it would have to have a real thematic resonance the way this one did, ultimately being about childhood trauma and the lack of love, and the loss of empathy. All those things are really what made this movie work for us, so we'd have to have something that had an equal thematic resonance."