The Joker: Folie á Deux trailer has a song in its heart

Get your jazz hands ready, people. Joker 2, which premieres in theaters October 4, finally has a trailer. The buzzy sequel to the 2019 Batman offshoot is subtitled Folie á Deux, which is a term for shared psychosis, or when two people share the same delusion. As two of our most gonzo actors working today, there are few performers better suited to portray such a relationship than Lady Gaga and Joaquin Phoenix. And few directors could understand the duality of man better than Todd Phillips, who made a dark and twisted, Academy Award-nominated comic book movie and also The Hangover trilogy.

Joker, which won Phoenix a Best Actor Oscar, was an origin story for the Joker—in this version, the downtrodden and mentally ill comedian Arthur Fleck, whose crime spree both horrifies and inspires Gotham City. Joker: Folie á Deux appears to be an origin story for Harley Quinn, the Joker’s lover and henchwoman created for the cartoon Batman: The Animated Series. As first portrayed in that series’ episode “Mad Love,” Harleen Quinzel was a psychiatrist who fell in love with the Joker while treating him as a patient at Arkham Asylum.

Joker and its follow-up film exist outside of the DC Universe continuity being crafted by studio heads James Gunn and Peter Safran, but it’s possibly the most highly anticipated DC project of the moment. We’ve had a slow but steady drip of news about Joker: Folie á Deux over the last few years: Lady Gaga is playing Harley! It’s a musical! It’s a $200 million jukebox musical with 15 songs, including the Judy Garland classic “That’s Entertainment”! Brendan Gleeson and Catherine Keener are also in it! All this from a guy who called rumors of a Joker sequel “annoying” back in 2019. “[The] movie’s not set up to [have] a sequel. We always pitched it as one movie, and that’s it,” he said at the time (via IGN). “We made this movie, I pitched it to Warner Bros. as one movie. It exists in its own world. That’s it.”

However, he also said he’d “do anything Joaquin wants to do,” so maybe what Joaquin wanted to do was make the Joker a song-and-dance man. We’ll see if that vision is as successful as the original in October.