Joker 2: Whatever Happened to DC Black?

Todd Phillips' proposed DC Black label was to start with 2019's Joker.

By Cameron Bonomolo

Todd Phillips is bidding adieu to DC. The Joker: Folie à Deux filmmaker — whose first production for DC Films, 2019's Joker, earned him a Best Director nod after becoming the first R-rated film to gross $1 billion worldwide — confirmed that there will be no Joker 3. "It's not really where this movie is headed for me," Phillips told The Hollywood Reporter when asked about a potential standalone film for Arthur Fleck's (Joaquin Phoenix) amour, Lee, better known as Harley Quinn (Lady Gaga). "I feel like my time in the DC Universe was these two films."

Fans may remember that Phillips made similar comments in 2019, when the director cast doubt on a Joker sequel with Phoenix. "We have no plans for a sequel," he said at the time. "[I've said], 'I will do anything Joaquin wants to do.' 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." 

Five years later, and the sequel materialized — to mixed reactions — as a jukebox musical set against the backdrop of Arthur's criminal trial. Likewise, the Joker 2 ending suggests the door is closed on a sequel. But there was a time that the first Joker was pitched as the start of DC Black, a label meant to separate "independent-minded films about these [DC] characters" from the rest of the interconnected DC Films universe (at the time, the DC Extended Universe). 

Taking its name from the DC Black Label imprint of DC Comics, which publishes more mature-oriented dark graphic novels like Batman: Damned and the Harley Quinn origin story Harleen, Phillips proposed DC Black as a broad and bold option for filmmakers to reinterpret DC characters outside of the DCEU.

"I said, 'This will be the first movie, and then we'll get this director to do that, and this director to do this, and we'll call it DC Black, and Joker will be the first film,'" Phillips said on Behind the Lens in 2019. "In a weird way, it gives you two bites of the apple, of these characters. You can do these kind of down-and-dirty character studies over here, and still do the DC Universe over there. To which they said, 'Okay, calm down, you're not starting a label here at Warners.'" 

The DC Films division, then overseen by president Walter Hamada, ultimately did not splinter off into a DC Black label, and Joker was the only movie to take place outside of the DCEU canon until 2022's The Batman (also set within its own standalone continuity, which Matt Reeves has dubbed The Batman Epic Crime Saga). According to Phillips, the DC regime thought it unnecessary to create a separate label when they could simply produce something like Joker under the DC Films branding and make it clear that it exists separately.

Phillips proposed three DC Black movies: Joker and "two other movies, with two other directors," he said of his pitch in 2019. Phillips declined to name the prospective directors or the DC villains who might have appeared in Joker-like movies, but producer Michael Uslan later suggested a Mr. Freeze movie, and filmmaker Mike Flanagan (The Haunting of Hill House, Midnight Mass) has since reportedly pitched a Clayface movie to James Gunn and Peter Safran, who reshaped DC Films into the new DC Studios when they assumed leadership duties in 2022.

While Gunn and Safran's new DC Universe will replace the old DC Extended Universe — starting with the animated Max series Creature Commandos in December before the Gunn-directed Superman movie officially launches the new canon in July 2025 — the co-heads are actively developing DC Studios projects set outside of the DCU. Anything not part of their cinematic universe will be branded Elseworlds, borrowing the name of another DC imprint about out-of-continuity tales. "DCU and Elseworlds are all within DC Studios, and under me and Peter, but the stories simply aren't interconnected," Gunn explained last year. That doesn't include Joker 2, which classifies as Elseworlds but was made under the watch of Warner Bros. and not DC Studios.

Joker: Folie à Deux is only in theaters Oct. 4th.

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