Joker director Todd Phillips says he’s “bounced around ideas” for a sequel with star Joaquin Phoenix, but the filmmaker is firm the DC Comics-inspired drama is planned to be a one-off.
“Well, I don’t think we’re gonna make a second one. That’s just not in our plans,” Phillips told Jake Hamilton. “But for fun, have me and Joaquin bounced around ideas? We were doing it when we were shooting, because that’s what you do sometimes.”
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Phillips earlier said he hopes to one day reteam with Phoenix, telling Total Film Magazine, “I would do anything with Joaquin, any day of the week. There’s nobody like him. If he 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.”
The director later had to clarify those comments, saying during a screening in Los Angeles he and studio Warner Bros. “have no plan for a sequel” to Joker.
“The quote was, ‘I will do anything Joaquin wants to do,’” Phillips explained. “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.”
But because Batman’s archenemy is a character who can be “infinitely interpreted,” Phillips expects the first Joker solo movie won’t be the last.
“What we’re trying to do with this film is do something entirely different from the comic book movies that have come before. And not because those aren’t cool but just because we want to try something different,” he previously told AP News. “But this won’t be the last Joker movie ever made. Something tells me that in 10 years someone else is going to do something.”
Calling past iterations of the character “all brilliantly unique,” Phillips continued, “This is one more group’s interpretation of a character that can be infinitely interpreted.”
Director Todd Phillips “Joker” centers around the iconic arch nemesis and is an original, standalone fictional story not seen before on the big screen. Phillips’ exploration of Arthur Fleck, who is indelibly portrayed by Joaquin Phoenix, is of a man struggling to find his way in Gotham’s fractured society. A clown-for-hire by day, he aspires to be a stand-up comic at night… but finds the joke always seems to be on him. Caught in a cyclical existence between apathy and cruelty, Arthur makes one bad decision that brings about a chain reaction of escalating events in this gritty character study.
Starring Joaquin Phoenix, Zazie Beetz, Frances Conroy and Robert De Niro, Joker opens October 4. Read ComicBook.com‘s five-star review of Joker here.
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