Oh No. Please Spare Me a Sequel to Joker.
Remember when everyone made a big deal about how Joker wasn’t like other movies about superheroes? Well, I guess throw that out the window, because they’re basically talking about making a sequel, and it might have had hints to other Batman villains, and I truly cannot handle any more of this movie.
Joaquin Phoenix talked to the Los Angeles Times about his work on Joker and talked about the possibility of a sequel. Originally, the idea was that they wouldn’t just do a sequel to do one but, apparently, Phoenix was so interested in exploring more of Arthur Fleck that he instantly told director Todd Philips to work on a sequel.
“Long before the release or before we had any idea if it would be successful, we talked about sequels. In the second or third week of shooting, I was like, ‘Todd, can you start working on a sequel? There’s way too much to explore.’ It was kind of in jest—but not really.”
Spare me. Whether or not it was a serious request, I sincerely hope that this movie does not go back on everything it has been preaching non-stop, that it’s “not like other movies” or that it was changing the superhero genre forever—two things it did not, in fact, do, but instead just made a bunch of fans of this movie absolutely insufferable to those of us who have problems with it.
I’m exceptionally tired of the discourse surrounding Joker mainly because a) The Dark Knight did this story better and b) it isn’t anything new. And the fact that Phoenix wants to explore more shows that this was always going to be a typical superhero world-building movie. The thing about Joker that aggravates me is that everything around it was geared towards tearing down the superhero genre.
And now that it is a successful R-rated movie? They want to continue telling a story that never needed to be told in the first place? It feels unnecessary and problematic when you look at the context of Joker and every problem that many found within it. So, now that Joaquin Phoenix seems to want a sequel, does that mean we’re going to see one? I hope not. This story, while not something I enjoyed, did have a good ending that fit the story and the character of the Joker as we know him.
Still, it broke records, and thus it isn’t surprising that we’re hearing talks of sequels. I beg, for my own sanity, that we don’t and let the tale of the Joker die but will we ever really be free? Not as long as we continue to tell Batman stories because even Joker had to include the Martha Wayne pearl necklace break because it’s super original, right?
(image: Warner Bros.)
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