The new Joker movie is Joker: Folie à Deux, which Warner Bros. released in October 2024. Todd Phillips directed it and wrote the script with Scott Silver. It starts roughly two years after the first film. Arthur Fleck is now a patient at Arkham State Hospital, waiting to stand trial for the murders he committed on live television.
The setup in a nutshell
Arthur is not the reluctant celebrity of the first movie anymore. He is medicated, guarded, and hauled to court in a security van. The film splits its time between the asylum, the courtroom, and the song-and-dance numbers that play inside his head. Those numbers are fantasy. They do not happen in the story's real world, and that detail trips up a lot of viewers who go in expecting a full-blown musical.
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Who Lady Gaga is playing
She plays Harleen "Lee" Quinzel, another patient at Arkham who latches onto Arthur and becomes his loudest defender. She is not the Dr. Harleen Quinzel of the comics. She is a fan who found him through trial coverage, and she tells him what he wants to hear. Whether she loves him or loves the idea of him is left open on purpose.
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What the plot actually does
The trial is the spine. The prosecution says Arthur is sane and accountable. His lawyer says he is not. Lee pushes him toward performance, chaos, and the Joker persona, while everyone else in the room keeps calling him Arthur. The tension is not about whether he escapes. It is about which version of himself he chooses when he finally speaks for himself in court.
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Why reactions are so split
- It plays as a courtroom drama with musical interludes, not a crime thriller.
- The songs exist to show Arthur's inner life, so they pause the plot instead of advancing it.
- It deliberately refuses the franchise setup the first film's ending seemed to promise.
- Joaquin Phoenix still carries every scene, even when the script wanders.
Do you need the first film first
Yes. Folie à Deux assumes you know who Arthur is, what he did on the Murray Franklin show, and why the city of Gotham rioted for him. Watching it cold makes the trial testimony land as noise. If you only have time for one, watch 2019's Joker and treat the sequel as an epilogue about the cost of the mask rather than the birth of a villain.