Music can’t be a cinematic device for supervillains

Todd Phillips’ Joker: Folie à Deux, a musical that mostly featured diegetic music – or music occurring within the context of the story which characters can hear – was a monumental flop. Paul Schrader, who wrote Taxi Driver has given a withering assessment, saying he walked out after 10 or 15 minutes, bought something, came back for another 10 minutes and decided “That was enough.” In conversation with playwright Jeremy O Harris for Interview Magazine, Schrader described the sequel as a “really bad musical.”

Struggling to recoup

Summer blockbuster superhero ensemble films usually have budgets, equal to or lower than the $200 million budget of this film before deductions, not including marketing expenses (although the studio did not spend as much on promoting this film compared to other summer blockbusters). The original film grossed over $1bn at the box office when it was released in 2019, while its sequel appears to be struggling to recoup the $190m to £200m it cost to make.

Crawling back to 2019

The original film, Joker, is an award-winning 2019 drama, starring Joaquin Phoenix as the nascent supervillain. The film took two hours in telling the grim and gritty back story of Arthur Fleck’s abusive childhood, his eventual adoption of a white-faced, clown-suited new identity, and the killing spree that prompted a series of riots in Gotham City.

In the sequel, Arthur, a failed comedian, struggles with dual identities and meets the love of his life, Harley Quinn (played by Lady Gaga), while incarcerated at Arkham State Hospital. The songs are distasteful — a playlist of canonised ballads and classics by Frank Sinatra, The Bee Gees, the Carpenters, and Burt Bacharach, plus show tunes plucked from MGM musicals of the ’50s and ’60s.

Why was the sequel a pain to watch?

Actor Rohit Mehra shares “It’s almost like taking a successful murder mystery franchise and making a comedy for a sequel.” While the first Joker tapped into familiar characters from pop culture and elevated them with consumate performances, it successfully explored the protagonist’s isolation and alienation from society. But by turning the sequel into a musical, says, “It almost undoes whatever the first part did.”, adding that “even the director has admitted that there may not be more versions of it.”

A song you couldn’t wait to finish

According to actor and presenter Zoran Saher, the musical format fundamentally undermines Arthur’s character. A crucial blunder, Zoran notes, is in the handling of Fleck and his alter-ego, the Joker persona. “The idea that his defence attorney constantly claims that the Joker and Arthur are two drastically different people is a given.” Yet, from that point forward, “almost every scene is elevated through a soundtrack that doesn’t reflect either of the two personalities that he’s portraying.”

Storytelling stumbles when it tries too hard to meet the expectations tied to an iconic character, leading to experimentation that misses the mark. Zoran questions this creative choice. “It almost felt like Todd Phillips was not willing to dig deeper, risking a mentally insecure, unstable and broken Joker.” Instead, the musical sequel ends up feeling like a creative misfire. “In trying to make it a musical sequel, it ended up becoming a song that you couldn’t wait to finish.”

We needed a stronger script

For film buff Hetal Jain, perhaps the lesson isn’t about making universally ‘good’ movies or catering to audience tastes, but about making deliberate choices. A film that risks alienating viewers may stumble, but it can still offer insight or provoke new conversations — qualities a safe and predictable sequel could never achieve. A fan of the actor, Hetal praises Joaquin Phoenix’s continued brilliance but points to Lady Gaga’s entrance during the courtroom scene as the film’s standout moment.

She also feels the script didn’t fully live up to its potential. “A stronger script could have allowed the film to truly sing (pun intended), giving it the depth and impact it needed.”