The second trailer for Joker 2 is here and more twisted than a six-pack of hard iced tea. It pulls back the curtain a bit more on how the canonical love story/abusive relationship between Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker and Lady Gaga’s Harley Quinn will take center stage in the sequel, but who’s going to be trying to fix who?
Joker: Folie À Deux is out October 4. Fans got a peak at the romance musical earlier this year with a teaser trailer and reporting that suggested the movie would be centered around over a dozen well-known songs remixed for the Gotham-based comic book movie. The new trailer gives a better sense of the movie’s setup, how Harley and the Joker meet up, and the retro show biz-styled chaos that will ensue.
Take a look:
Incarcerated in Arkham Hospital after his rampage at the end of the first movie, Arthur Fleck and Harleen Quinzel begin indulging one another’s delusions of stardom while civil unrest boils up among disillusioned gangs of Jokerfied fans. The trailer ends with Joker and Harley on stage asking one another if they should give the audience what they want before blowing up the theater.
It’s possibly a meta-nod to the tension between what comic books fans might want from a Joker movie and director Todd Phillips ambitions in making what some insiders have referred to as a “Jukebox musical” structured more around vignettes and then overarching story. But the highlight for me was seeing Brendan Gleeson show up as a prison guard chiding a smirking Phoenix.
2019’s Joker was a massive box office hit, bringing in over $1 billion worldwide despite its small budget. It hit at just the right time to give people fatigued from overdosing on the cookie-cutter MCU a different take on a comic book character origin movie, while also tapping into a lot of popular mythmaking populist undercurrents and anti-establishment sentiments during the first Trump presidency. It’ll be interesting to see whether the movie has anything to say about our national rerun five years later or it feels like a relic from a different, pre-pandemic era.