2 Years Later, Joker 2’s Most Hated Twist Is Actually Its Best Idea (And DC Will Never Explore It)

No one expected the sequel to such a well-received and critically acclaimed movie to be this different. Two years after its release, Joker: Folie à Deux is still a movie most people would rather pretend never happened, and whenever it does come up, the conversation tends to be more controversial than anything else. There were plenty of reasons people turned against it: the fact that it was a musical, the way Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix) is treated, and the fact that he isn’t the version of the Joker some fans expected to see after the first film. But today, it’s worth taking another look at the whole production and realizing that one of its choices may have been judged more unfairly than any other.

At the time, it felt almost like a deliberate attempt to annoy the audience, but today, it actually makes a lot of sense. We’re talking about a plot twist that still may not be everyone’s cup of tea, and that’s fine, but the decision fits with what we understand about the story from the very beginning of the original feature, and that’s hard to deny. Let’s break it down.

Joker: Folie à Deux Makes More Sense Than It Seems

Todd Phillips’ project was about telling the story of Batman’s biggest enemy in a more complex and deeper way, as we saw in Joker. Did the idea work? Absolutely, and it created plenty of expectations when the sequel was announced. So, in 2024, Joker: Folie à Deux hit theaters, picking up with Arthur while he’s locked up in Arkham and waiting for his trial over the crimes he committed in the first installment. By this point, though, he’s no longer the same person, because to Gotham, he’s become the Joker, a figure that took on a life of its own after the murder of Murray Franklin (Robert De Niro) — and that’s why Lee Quinzel (Lady Gaga) becomes interested in him. She’s not exactly fascinated by the depressed and insecure man underneath the image, but by the character. As Arthur starts to realize that, he also begins to question whether he actually wants to keep being the Joker.

And no one is saying the idea of Arthur questioning who he is is a bad one, but it’s a major shift given the events of the original movie seemed to be building toward the exact opposite: Arthur kills Murray, puts on the makeup, and ends the film surrounded by people treating him like some kind of symbol. The ending seemed to point toward a complete transformation — this man had finally become the Joker. But Folie à Deux spends much of its runtime taking that interpretation apart. And here’s the thing: that’s not necessarily a bad choice, because it’s exactly in that moment in Joker, when we see Arthur climb onto the police car and be celebrated by his followers, that we can tell this isn’t exactly Arthur anymore, but the alter ego he created. The problem is that a lot of the audience didn’t really buy that logic and, as a result, couldn’t understand what the second film was trying to say.

After Arthur abandons the Joker persona, he’s killed by another inmate (Connor Storrie) at Arkham — the man tells a joke, attacks him, and then cuts his own face into a smile. The implication is pretty clear: someone else can take on the identity. For most people, this was a disaster. After spending two movies following Arthur’s story, the feature seemed to end by saying that he wasn’t really the Joker after all. But he didn’t need to become the ultimate villain to create him, because once he kills Murray live on TV, what happens next is no longer entirely up to him. People start wearing clown masks; protests in Gotham adopt his image; and the murder stops being just a crime committed by a disturbed man and starts representing something to other people. Arthur realizes that he’s finally gotten everyone’s attention, but he has absolutely no control over what that attention means.

So, what’s the exact purpose behind Folie à Deux? Take that idea one step further. If the Joker has become a symbol, then there isn’t really any reason for Arthur to keep playing that role, right? And the movie focuses on what happens when he tries to do exactly that: Lee loses interest when she realizes that Arthur doesn’t want to be the character she imagined him to be; his admirers don’t want to hear that he’s just Arthur Fleck, and even during the trial, it’s clear that there’s a huge difference between the man sitting in that courtroom and the figure Gotham has created in its head. Because of that, the protagonist stops being interesting to everyone around him, which is a cruel consequence, but it also reinforces an idea from the first movie: people only started noticing him once he became the Joker. As a person, he was still practically invisible. It makes sense.

The sequel to Joker wants to say that Arthur isn’t finding out that he’s some kind of supervillain, but that maybe he never wanted to be one in the first place — he just wanted to feel seen. That’s what explains why he dies immediately after letting the identity go, because if he had ended the movie fully embracing the persona, his arc would just have been about finally becoming what the audience expected him to be, and that’s it. So this is a much more interesting ending. And is it the audience’s fault for not understanding that? Definitely not. Folie à Deux had a good idea, but the structure is what messed everything up, especially because of the musical numbers, which, even if you understand the intention was for them to be a natural extension of Arthur’s psychology, didn’t really help. But that’s because Phillips didn’t want to tell the story the audience expected.

The Joker Sequel Chose to Defy the Audience’s Expectations

In fact, this may be the biggest reason the twist was received so badly: it goes against the most obvious expectation. After the first movie, people wanted to see the natural next step, which would have been Arthur becoming the Joker we know from DC. But the sequel doesn’t do that at all, as from the beginning, this version of the character was never a criminal mastermind. The whole point of this film was to make the kind of character study that had become rare since features like Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, The King of Comedy, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. In interviews, the director explained that he wanted to do a “deep dive” into a comic book figure without superpowers, fights, or the traditional blockbuster structure — the Joker was especially interesting because he doesn’t have a definitive origin.

So, in his movies, we see a vulnerable, impulsive, deeply troubled man who eventually finds a persona that gives him a sense of power he never had before. That doesn’t mean he’s incapable of violence; it just means there’s not much about this version of the character that points toward the traditional DC character. Suddenly turning him into a crime boss would have required a much bigger transformation than simply acknowledging that the Joker was a role other people could adopt. That could have even opened the door to a possibility that will probably never be explored, either in a third movie or in the DCU, unfortunately. Turning the Joker into a faceless brand is a compelling idea, but it’s not like everyone was going to buy into it, and that’s fair.

The problem is this whole idea was presented at the worst possible time. After a movie that was already challenging audience expectations in almost every way, anyone expecting something more conventional and closer to what Joker had delivered could easily see it as though everything had happened for nothing. So yes, Folie à Deux can still be a film people absolutely hate, because taste is personal, but in terms of consistency, it got this part right. For a story about the difference between Arthur and the character Gotham shaped, it’s a pretty logical conclusion.

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