Joker: Folie in Deux may have been a surprising wet squib at the box office this weekend, but its ending got people talking regardless of whether they went out to see the sequel or not. And as controversial an ending as it is, we apparently almost got the same at the climax of the original film… if not for the intended rejection from Christopher Nolan himself.
Folie in Deux climaxes with Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix) incarcerated, his trial completed and awaiting the death penalty, stabbed to death by a fellow inmate. As Arthur bleeds out, from a hidden background we see the prisoner begin to sneer, before taking a knife to their face and appearing to draw a smiley scar on their mouth, similar to the look of Heath Ledger’s Joker. The Dark Knight. As one Joker falls, another metaphorically rises. But a new report suggests that a version of that controversial moment may have come true in the original Todd Phillips. The Joker the movie.
As part of a new report in the Hollywood Reporter discussing the fall of Folie in Deux‘s box office flop, the trade cites a source who suspects that the script is original The Joker concluded Arthur, standing in front of his assembled followers, hurting himself with that familiar smile. However, the idea was scrapped—not at the behest of Phillips, or even Warner Bros.’, but one of the studio’s top directors at the time, Christopher Nolan, who allegedly believed that only the incarnation of the late Heath Ledger should be the Joker. separated by a smile scar.
During the first time The JokerNolan and Warner Bros. they had an incredibly strong relationship – a relationship that will clearly sour after the covid-19 pandemic of 2020, when the director opposed Warner Bros.’ plans to put its 2021 theatrical slate on a day-by-day basis through the studio’s platform Max (then known by its full name, HBO Max). He’s already frustrated with the theatrical release of his time-bending film The Tenet at Warner in 2020, Nolan was one of the most vocal and notable directors to publicly criticize the decision. Breaking with his traditional distribution relationship with Warner Bros., he took his critically acclaimed smash hit Oppenheimer at Universal last year.
All of that means that it’s time Folie in Deux has been around, Nolan wasn’t exactly at Warner Bros. a person getting scarred at the climax of the film. Would this moment have been more controversial if it had been Arthur’s Joker self-destruction, or an endless twist about how he gets him out of the picture? We won’t know now, but one thing’s for sure—don’t ask Chris Nolan how he feels about it, he probably won’t tell you.
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