Joker 2 director has a surprising answer to a question everyone has been asking: what if Arthur Fleck met Batman?

Sep. 25, 2024

“I think Arthur would be in awe of the alpha male that is Batman”

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“I think Arthur would be in awe of the alpha male that is Batman. I really do. I think Arthur would look up and appreciate it,” Phillips toldIGN. “I think he’d be in awe of that.” Although Bruce Wayne does exist in the version of Gotham City that Arthur lives in, he’s not Batman – not yet, anyway.

“I think Arthur always had a fascination with men at ease, and he is not a man at ease. Murray Franklin in the first movie was a man at ease,” Phillips continued. “He probably saw the guys he worked with as men at ease, and that was the one thing that Arthur could never be was a man at ease.”

In the upcoming Joker sequel, officially titled Joker: Folie à Deux, Arthur will instead come face to face with another iconic comic book character: Harley Quinn, played by Lady Gaga. The movie’s title is a French term that translates to “shared madness” and is also used to refer to a psychiatric syndrome in which symptoms of a delusional belief, and sometimes hallucinations, are transferred from one person to another.

Alongside Phoenix and Gaga, the sequel’s cast also includes Brendan Gleeson, Catherine Keener, Harry Lawtey, and Steve Coogan, while Zazie Beetz returns as Sophie, her character from the first Joker movie.

Joker: Folie à Deux arrives on the big screen on October 4. In the meantime, check out our guide to the rest of this year’s biggestmovie release datesat a glance.

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I’m an Entertainment Writer here at GamesRadar+, covering everything film and TV-related across the Total Film and SFX sections. I help bring you all the latest news and also the occasional feature too. I’ve previously written for publications like HuffPost and i-D after getting my NCTJ Diploma in Multimedia Journalism.

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