Joker: Folie à Deux ending was a shock to many. However, what was even more shocking was the confirmation of who the true madman of Gotham was — it was certainly not Arthur Fleck.
In an interview with IGN, the director Todd Phillips said Arthur was never meant to be Batman’s Joker in the first place.
“One of the things that people never understood about the first movie was, “I don’t get it. He visits Bruce Wayne, and he’s 30 years older than Bruce Wayne,” the 53-year-old said.
The filmmaker said the movie’s title was clear in explaining that it was not about the supervillain of Gotham.
“What kind of geriatric Joker is going to fight in the future?” I don’t know if you’ve ever saw the script of the first movie. The first film is called Joker. It’s not called The Joker, it’s called Joker. And the first film under the script always said “An origin story.”
“Never said THE origin story. It was this idea that maybe this isn’t THE Joker. Maybe this is the inspiration for the Joker,” he continued. “So, in essence at the end of this movie, the thing you’re being left with is “Wait, what is that thing happening behind him? Is that the guy?”
Todd also distinguished between the Joker and Arthur, stating that the latter was not a “criminal mastermind.”
“The big thing with Arthur, Joaquin’s version of Joker, our version of Joker, he’s not a criminal mastermind. It’s one of the things we’ve always said about him, even in the first movie,” the director said.
“And if we never made a sequel, it was just like, think what you want about what this guy turns into, but it’s never any version of the Joker that we all grew up on.”
“You know what I mean? That’s just not who Arthur is. So, it’s kind of this idea of when somebody becomes an icon, and we put things on that person as a group, as a society, as a media, as whatever. We put things on that person that maybe they can’t live up to,” Todd concluded.
