10 Movies That Hated You For Watching
2. Joker: Folie à Deux
Joker: Folie à Deux is one of the most fascinatingly contemptuous sequels ever made.
After Todd Phillips' gritty original 2019 take on the Clown Prince of Crime grossed over $1 billion at the box office and won Joaquin Phoenix a well-earned Best Actor Oscar, it was only inevitable that Warner Bros. would be hungry for a sequel.
While Joker felt like a standalone one-off project, money talks, and it's fair to assume that both Phillips and Phoenix were enticed to return with enormously fat paydays. All the same, just as he transitioned the Hangover sequels into a more mean-spirited brand of crime comedy, Phillips decided to get very, very weird with Joker: Folie à Deux, crafting a film that takes unsubtle aim at the very fans who propelled the original to such success.
Beyond the strangeness of mounting the film as a musical, the Joker sequel refuses to simply depict Arthur Fleck (Phoenix) as The Joker he seemed to become at the end of the first movie, instead flatly rejecting this notion and making great pains to depict him as pathetic and pitiable.
Lady Gaga's Lee is meanwhile a stand-in for sections of the fandom who appreciate only the shallowest aspects of The Joker rather than Fleck as a human being, culminating in nose-thumbing ending that categorically slams the door on any prospect of a third film.
Phillips clearly wanted to do anything but make a movie which glorified Fleck's alter-ego any further, and spent 138 minutes flipping off the great many who expected that. Unsurprisingly, audiences weren't terribly happy about this.