News broke last night that Todd Phillips’s long-rumored Joker sequel — tentatively titled Joker: Folie à deux — will be a musical, with Lady Gaga up for the role of Harley Quinn if the studio can close the deal. The pop sensation previously appeared in the Warner Bros. movie A Star is Born with Guardians of the Galaxy star Bradley Cooper, and the role of Harley has to have some appeal to almost any actor. One of the most popular characters created by Marvel or DC in the last 30 years, Harley started as a glorified sidekick to The Joker in Batman: The Animated Series and has blown up into a character with her own comics, animated series, and three feature film appearances to date.
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It’s equally unsurprising that fan artist BossLogic — who is so popular that he has been tapped by studios to do genuine promotional art — is on top of it. Yesterday, he revealed a look at his take on Gaga in the role of Harley.
You can see the image below.
Joker drew mixed responses from fans, but rave reviews upon its release in 2019, and earned more than $1 billion at the global box office, making it one of the highest-grossing R-rated movies of all time. Both Phillips and Phoenix was showered with awards and award nominations for the film, and while they both expressed some reservations about returning to the world of Joker, neither had ever fully shut down the idea.
“I wouldn’t have thought this is my dream role, but now, honestly, I can’t stop thinking about it,” Phoenix said in 2019. “I talked to Todd a lot about what else we might be able to do, in general, just to work together, but also specifically, if there’s something else we can do with Joker that might be interesting. So, it ended up being a dream role. It’s nothing that I really wanted to do prior to working on this movie.”
Earlier this year, reports started to heat up, suggesting that development had gone from being a theoretical possibility to a real likelihood. For his part, a sequel could help Phillips do what he originally wanted to do, which was to set up an R-rated brand of DC movies at Warners.
“When I pitched them Joker, it wasn’t a movie, it was, let’s do a whole label,” Phillips said in 2019. “They shut that down quickly and I get it. Who am I to walk in and start a label at a film studio? But they said, let’s do this one.”
There is no official timeline yet for production or release of Joker 2.