Todd Phillips resists calling Joker: Folie A Deux a musical for some reason

Is there any genre more maligned in Hollywood today than the musical? It’s a well-documented phenomenon that studios have been trying to obscure the fact that their musicals are musicals in the marketing—hell, the trailer for Wicked barely has any singing or dancing in it. Thus, the news that the highly anticipated follow-up to Joker would be a $200 million jukebox musical was slightly puzzling. Now, in a new profile for Variety, director Todd Phillipps disputes that Joker: Folie à Deux had a $200 million budget, and that it’s even a musical. 

Variety reports that Phillips “struggles” with the musical label, as he explains,  “Most of the music in the movie is really just dialogue. It’s just Arthur not having the words to say what he wants to say, so he sings them instead.” One might argue that is a description of most musicals, but really, Folie à Deux is not like other musicals. Phillips points out that most of the musical numbers exist in the imaginations of the characters, which… well that also fits the description of many musicals, doesn’t it?  “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,” he says. “No disrespect, because I loved In The Heights.”

The poor musical! Once the backbone of Hollywood, the true moneymaker, the star vehicle, now so deeply uncool the director of The Hangover doesn’t even want to claim it. Here he’s making a film with song-and-dance numbers set to old standards like “Get Happy” and “That’s Life” and still he’s rejecting the label. Apparently, to differentiate the film from other musicals, this one’s going to be… kind of bad? Both actors, Joaquin Phoenix and Lady Gaga, are more than capable of carrying a tune, but the Joker team wanted something a little rougher. 

“We asked ourselves what would need to be true for two people to just break into song in the middle of a conversation? Where does the music come from when no one can hear it but the characters?” Gaga shares with Variety, which also sounds like regular musical stuff, except “Neither Arthur nor Lee are professional singers, and they shouldn’t sound like they are,” she proposes. 

Phoenix also championed these “nerve-racking but honest” numbers, which Variety describes as a “rawer, more unstable sound” that “occasionally required singing off-key.” Phoenix says, “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.” Just as Joker brought real-world edge to the comic book movie, so too, apparently, will Joker 2 to the musical.