No, Joker: Folie à Deux Is Not A Dark Knight Prequel

If you have been spending any amount of time on the internet talking about Joker: Folie à Deux this week, you have likely seen a theory that the movie serves as a prequel to The Dark Knight. We even talked about it once already! There’s an explanation here, but it’s actually pretty spoilery, so we’re going to give you just a little bit of space before we break it down. What we can say, is that the plain text of Batman Begins, with absolutely no additional context, disproves the theory. It’s obviously fun to speculate about the ties a theoretically-stand-alone movie, and sometimes you’ll get lucky and it will turn into something (hello there, Black Lightning), but in this case, audiences are probably reaching quite a bit.

Okay, everybody who’s worried about spoilers gone? Sounds good, let’s break it down.

At the end of Joker: Folie à Deux, Arthur is waiting on a visitor. A man enters the room, stabs Arthur to death, and then bursts into laughter and carves a smile onto his own face. The idea, then, is that Arthur is not and never was the Joker who would go on to terrorize Gotham, but just a guy who inspired Joker, like Conrad Veidt in The Man Who Laughs.

And because it’s literal scars, rather than makeup or a chemical disfigurement, the connection to Ledger’s Oscar-winning turn as Joker immediately springs to a lot of fans’ minds. After all, he did repeatedly make up new stories about what actually happened to give him those scars.

According to Collider, that immediate association was something that concerned Nolan, and while he was still in business with Warner Bros. in 2019, he asked for an alteration to the original Joker ending. Reportedly, that movie would originally have ended with Arthur carving a smile into his own face, rather than smearing a bloody smile across his lips, as he does in the final cut. That’s supposedly Nolan’s doing, because he explicitly did not want his Joker to be “explained” or given a stealth origin story.

Obviously, Nolan had nothing to do with this movie, so it’s easy to argue that any impact he had on Joker doesn’t carry over to its sequel. The Collider story speculates that the ending of this movie was done specifically because the filmmakers felt safer and more comfortable to dismiss Nolan’s input.

Whether that conjecture is true or not, it certainly seems like Nolan was right: if you give him scars, some people will immediately think it’s Ledger’s take on the character. But are they right in thinking that?

Well, no.

There are two scenes in Batman Begins that would put the kibosh on this idea, but one is particularly clear on the point.

First, we know what age Thomas and Martha Wayne were when they were killed in both Batman Begins and Joker. Neither their age and appearance nor the specifics of their death match up with what we see in Joker. After all, while you get a pretty traditional version of the Waynes’ murder in Batman Begins, the one in Joker takes place during a Joker-themed riot.

At the end of Batman Begins, James Gordon shines the Bat-Signal in the air and brings Batman a piece of evidence: a playing card. He tells him the story of a madman raising hell in Gotham and leaving calling cards featuring a Joker.

Let’s have a little thought experiment, for just a moment. It seems like, if the events of Joker had happened to the characters seen in Batman Begins, this wouldn’t be a baffling, inexplicable event.

Batman: “Joker.” You mean like Arthur Fleck?

Gordon: Oh, yeah! That’s right! How did I forget? That riot almost tore this city apart.

Batman: Yeah, and my parents got killed. It would be super weird if I forgot all about it, too.

Gordon: Your…parents?

Batman: I’ve said too much!

Gordon: Oh, man. I made that whole speech about escalation, and how you wearing a mask is going to inspire criminals to do other crazy stuff, but you’re just reacting to that Fleck guy and the Joker riots! The world is a wild place.

…Okay, maybe it wouldn’t have played exactly like that, but you get the idea. It’s incredibly unlikely that, in a universe where not only did the Joker riot happen but also Thomas and Martha Wayne were killed during the event, the arrival of the Joker calling card would be treated as an enigma.

Besides all of that, Ledger’s Joker was a talker. Dude loved his supervillain monologue. You don’t think it ever would have come up that he was the better, cooler version of an existing baddie?

It’s harmless to consider this your head canon. It’s a ton of fun to come up with our own interpretations of the media we enjoy. But it doesn’t hold up to real scrutiny.