Todd Phillips Releases JOKER 2 Photo Of Joaquin Phoenix

Director Todd Phillips has released a first look at JOKER 2 starring Joaquin Phoenix.

The sequel to the successful JOKER film will be released on Oct. 4, 2024. Subtitled Folie à Deux (which translates to “madness shared by two”), Harley Quinn will be played by Lady Gaga.

The JOKER film garnered numerous awards and award nominations across all categories, among them: 11 Academy Award and BAFTA Award nominations—including Best Picture—more than any other film; two Golden Globe and Critics’ Choice Awards wins, and the Golden Lion, the top honor at the Venice Film Festival.

Joaquin Phoenix’s remarkable performance and composer Hildur Guðnadóttir’s haunting score won Oscars for Best Actor and Best Score.

In 2019’s JOKER, forever alone in a crowd, Arthur Fleck seeks connection. Yet, as he trods the sooted Gotham City streets and rides the graffitied mass transit rails of a hostile town teeming with division and dissatisfaction, Arthur wears two masks. One, he paints on for his day job as a clown. The other he can never remove; it’s the guise he projects in a futile attempt to feel he’s a part of the world around him, and not the misunderstood man whom life is repeatedly beating down. Fatherless, Arthur has a fragile mother, arguably his best friend, who nicknamed him Happy, a moniker that’s fostered in Arthur a smile that hides the heartache beneath. But, when bullied by teens on the streets, taunted by suits on the subway, or simply teased by his fellow clowns at work, this social outlier only becomes even more out of sync with everyone around him.

Directed, co-written and produced by Todd Phillips, “Joker” is the filmmaker’s original vision of the infamous DC villain, an origin story infused with, but distinctly outside, the character’s more traditional mythologies. Phillips’ exploration of Arthur Fleck, who is indelibly portrayed by Joaquin Phoenix, is of a man struggling to find his way in Gotham’s fractured society. Longing for any light to shine on him, he tries his hand as a stand-up comic, but finds the joke always seems to be on him. Caught in a cyclical existence between apathy and cruelty and, ultimately, betrayal, Arthur makes one bad decision after another that brings about a chain reaction of escalating events in this gritty, allegorical character study.