Joker: Folie à Deux Gets First Poster, Trailer Release Announced

Joaquin Phoenix and Lady Gaga make the perfect couple on the first poster for Joker: Folie á Deux. The musical sequel to Todd Phillips’ Joker is gearing up its marketing, with an October release date on the far horizon. If witnessing the long-awaited sequel to Joker wasn’t enough, Joker: Folie á Deux is also bringing in singer, songwriter, and actress Lady Gaga as the DC icon Harley Quinn. Phillips has released the first poster for Joker: Folie á Deux, as well as announcing when the first trailer for the film will arrive.

“First trailer coming April 9. #jokermovie,” director Todd Phillips wrote in an Instagram post. The poster for Joker: Folie á Deux features Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker and Lady Gaga’s Harley Quinn dancing together, with Joker dipping Harley Quinn as light shines through a window. “The World Is a Stage” the poster also states, with the film’s release date of October 4th.

Joker 2’s place in James Gunn’s DC Universe

With James Gunn and Peter Safran co-running DC Studios, the future of projects not firmly in their DC Universe has been up for debate. Luckily, films such as The Batman: Part II and Joker: Folie á Deux can exist beside Superman: Legacy. The creation of the “Elseworlds” banner will help alleviate any confusion, with movies under Elseworlds existing outside of the main DC Universe continuity.

Gunn revealed in December that the actual Elseworlds banner won’t debut until at least 2025, when movies that Gunn and Safran oversee start to be released following Superman: Legacy. This means that at least Joker 2 (and likely Matt Reeves’s Batman movies) won’t be “Elseworlds,” just stand-alone movies without any special branding.

Fans figured this out in the way that most DC Universe news is broken these days: they asked James Gunn directly. After a fan asked whether there would be special branding for Joker 2, Gunn shot the idea down completely.

“Nope,” Gunn said on Threads. “Won’t debut until the films we’ve worked on.”

What is Joker 2 about?

Joker: Folie à Deux will be a musical that follows the twisted romance between Joaquin Phoenix‘s Arthur Fleck / Joker and Gaga’s Harley Quinn, with a lot of the film reportedly taking place within Arkham Asylum. The film will also feature appearances from Zazie Beetz, Brendon Gleeson, Catherine Keener, and Jacob Lofland.

“It makes me so happy, because I said from the very beginning that all I want is for Harley Quinn to be one of those characters, the way Macbeth or Batman, always gets passed from great actor to great actor,” Margot Robbie previously said of Lady Gaga taking on the role. “It’s kind of like someone gets to do their Batman, or someone gets to do their Macbeth. I feel like, in not so many cases, are they female characters – Queen Elizabeth I, but beyond that, which I got to have a crack out as well, which I was honored to do. I was like, ‘Wow! Cate Blanchett did Queen Elizabeth I. Now I get to.’ It’s such an honor to have built a foundation strong enough that Harley can now be one of those characters that other actors get to have a go at playing. And I think she’ll do something incredible with it.”