In September 2019, at a press conference in Los Angeles, the director Todd Phillips decided to set the record straight. His forthcoming movie, Joker, starring Joaquin Phoenix, would not be getting a sequel. It was designed as a self-contained one-film experience that referenced Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy and other Seventies New York classics. “The movie’s not set up to have a sequel,” he said of a film that ends with exquisite finality after Phoenix’s deranged loner has ultimately become a criminal demigod. The last shot features Joker, in Arkham state hospital, sauntering down an empty corridor, ecstatic and triumphant while Frank Sinatra’s That’s Life blares on the soundtrack. A title card reads: “The End.” Phillips, at the LA press conference, added, just