Watch out for spoilers ahead!
The final scene of ‘Joker: Folie à Deux’ showed Arthur Fleck meeting his end after taking responsibility for his crimes and renouncing his Joker persona during his trial.
An Arkham inmate stopped him in the corridor to tell a joke and stabbed him to death while delivering the punchline. Then, he carved a smile on his face, implying that he was the ‘real’ Joker.
“There’s a warmth in that scene, which is nice,” Joaquin Phoenix recently said in a chat with IGN while commenting on the highly-criticized ending.
“That’s all that I was thinking about that I was after, is here’s this young man who’s telling me a joke and he’s nervous to tell me the joke, I can tell that he’s nervous, and I’m going to hear him out. And it’s a pretty good setup.”
The sequel didn’t perform well neither commercially nor critically since it came out on October 4. Some insiders said the movie’s struggle was due to director Todd Phillips’ decision to keep it separate from DC while others pointed fingers at Phoenix.
A few sources have claimed that the ‘Joker’ star and Phillips developed the follow-up based on a dream the former had. One even said that the project was made for the actor himself instead of a broad audience.
Despite the backlash, the director stood by his finale. He told The Hollywood Reporter, “[Arthur] realized that everything is so corrupt, it’s never going to change, and the only way to fix it is to burn it all down. When those guards kill that kid in the hospital, he realizes that dressing up in makeup, putting on this thing, it’s not changing anything.”
“In some ways, he’s accepted the fact that he’s always been Arthur Fleck, he’s never been this thing that’s been put upon him, this idea that Gotham people put on him, that he represents,” he then explained. “He’s an unwitting icon. This thing was placed on him, and he doesn’t want to live as a fake anymore — he wants to be who he is.”
After its first week in theaters, ‘Joker: Folie à Deux’ earned only $120 million against around a $200 million budget. By comparison, the original film opened to $96.2 million and ultimately grossed $1 billion worldwide in 2019.
