While the adage of “new year, new me” is one that’s often never adhered to by anyone who utters it, the dozens (dozens!) of folks who swear by Todd Phillips’ Joker sequel, Folie à Deux, are God’s hardest-working soldiers and will shout to the heat death of the universe that the DC Studios film was simply ahead of its time. Unsurprisingly, key among those folks are bigwigs at Warner Bros. who say they love the film despite fans being less than lukewarm with it.
In an interview with the Wrap, Warner Bros. CEO Pamela Abdy and chairperson Michael De Luca reminisced over the Joaquin Phoenix-led film. More specifically, their conversation brushed over how the film was a box-office bomb for the pocket-watchers among us and a rotten sequel, according to Rotten Tomatoes. But as far as the Warner Bros. head honchos are concerned, all that noise ignores what the film truly was: bold and underappreciated.
“It was really revisionist,” De Luca told the Wrap. “It may be that it was too revisionist for a global mainstream audience, but I thought that Todd and his screenwriting partner Scott [Silver] did the thing that most people making sequels don’t do, which is they decided to not repeat themselves. I do give them immense props for not repeating themselves, but it just turned out to not connect with the audience.”
Abdy echoed De Luca’s sentiments with a bit more cup-half-full retrospective optimism about Folie à Deux, adding, “I really liked the movie. I still do.”
By contrast, Phoenix’s co-star, Lady Gaga, seems perfectly content with folks not liking the movie.
“People just sometimes don’t like some things,” Gaga told Elle in 2025. “It’s that simple. And I think to be an artist, you have to be willing for people to sometimes not like it. And you keep going even if something didn’t connect in the way that you intended…When [fear of failure] makes its way into your life, that can be hard to get control of. It’s part of the mayhem.”
While Warner Bros. bosses saying they loved a movie that flopped is giving “We’ve investigated ourselves and found no wrongdoing” levels of a cope, they aren’t the only people who believe that Joker 2, with enough time, will grow on people. Famously, Death Stranding developer and noted cinephile Hideo Kojima wrote a lengthy review on X, saying, “Over the next 10 or 20 years, this film’s reputation will likely change along with the permeation of hero movies to come. It may take some time for it to become a true ‘folie à deux.’”
Quentin Tarantino took his own praise a step further in a 2024 interview with the Wrap, saying that Phillips was the Joker in a cosmic sense, while taking joy in his directing serving as a middle finger to execs and comic book fans’ expectations.
“The Joker directed the movie,” Tarantino said. “The entire concept, even him spending the studio’s money—he’s spending it like the Joker would spend it, all right? And then his big surprise gift—haha!—the jack-in-the-box, when he offers you his hand for a handshake and you get a buzzer with 10,000 volts shooting you—is the comic book geeks. He’s saying ‘fuck you’ to all of them. He’s saying fuck you to the movie audience. He’s saying fuck you to Hollywood. He’s saying fuck you to anybody who owns any stock at DC and Warner Bros… And Todd Phillips is the Joker. Un film de Joker, all right, is what it is. He is the Joker.”
Sidebar: to everyone who couldn’t help reading the above in Tarantino’s voice, we apologize. As far as where the folks at io9 are concerned, we’re still standing 10 toes down with our review of Folie à Deux. It just sucked.
Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.
