The first Joker movie showed us the twisted origin story of the DC villain. Joker 2 takes place two years later where Arthur Fleck finds new love with Harley Quinn. Despite the trailers’ musical hints and the leads’ music backgrounds, Todd Phillips questions if his sequel is a musical.
Joker 2’s trailers have Joaquin Phoenix sing “For Once in My Life” and “What the World Needs Now.” After a set video revealing Lady Gaga carrying a tune, it’s expected that the singer will lay down tracks of her own. With all of these musical teases in Folie à Deux, does that mean the Joker sequel is a musical? Todd Phillips struggled to give an answer to Variety:
“Most of the music in the movie is really just dialogue,” said Phillips. “It’s just Arthur not having the words to say what he wants to say, so he sings them instead.”
It looks like Joker 2 could fall into fully-sung musical movies like Les Misérables, The Phantom of the Opera, and Umbrellas of Cherbourg. The previous film’s music moments, like Arthur Fleck’s bathroom and subway stairs dances, symbolized his descent into madness. It ought to be puzzling if these dreamy song-and-dance sequences are real, fake, a dream, or a delusion.
While Joker 2 promises us a lot of music, Todd Phillips doesn’t want fans to get the wrong idea about the movie’s tone:
“I just don’t want people to think that it’s like In the Heights, where the lady in the bodega starts to sing and they take it out onto the street, and the police are dancing. No disrespect, because I loved In the Heights.”
What else is there to know about Joker 2’s music?
Joaquin Phoenix and Lady Gaga will perform their songs live accompanied by an off-camera piano player. Since Arthur Fleck and Harley Quinn are not professional singers, the Walk the Line actor said hitting the right notes wasn’t a requirement:
“It was important to me that we never perform the songs as one typically does in a musical. We didn’t want vibrato and perfect notes.”
You can expect to see 15 reinterpretations of classic songs like “That’s Entertainment” from the musical The Band Wagon. But, Variety previously said there may be room for an original song to be added to the final version. Expect to hear Oscar-winning composer Hildur Guðnadóttir’s distinctive tone from the first Joker find its way into each song. Whether Joker 2 is considered a musical or not, audiences are sure to be watching a memorable mind-blowing movie with its theatrical release on October 4th.
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