“Trust Me, We Can Tell”: Todd Phillips Confirms that James Gunn Had Nothing to Do With ‘Joker: Folie à Deux’

‘Joker: Folie à Deux’ premiered yesterday to an overwhelmingly negative critical and fan reception. The movie was awarded a “D” CinemaScore, the lowest when it comes to superhero movies. On Rotten Tomatoes, it holds the unflattering 33% approval rate by the critics and 33% when it comes to the audiences.

Amazingly, every time I check the score it keeps plummeting, and by all means the movie is certified rotten. Box office predictions don’t look good. The movie earned $7M in pre-viewings, less than the first installment, which is bad considering that it had 3 times the budget of the original movie, currently reported at $200M.

Most of this bad reception has something to do with the fact that the movie is a musical with a nonsensical story. Despite both Lady Gaga and Todd Phillips claiming that the movie is not a musical, it most definitely is a musical, and not a good one at that.

Since James Gunn and Peter Safran are currently co-CEOs of DC Studios, it’s expected that they are going to be involved at least to some extent with all DC-based movies released by Warner Bros. Thankfully this wasn’t the case with ‘Joker: Folie à Deux.’

Phillips confirmed, in a rather smug way, that James Gunn had nothing to do with this. Phillips stated that the new head of DC Studios had no influence on the film at all as the movie is more of a Warner Bros film than a DC film.

With all due respect to [Gunn and Safran], This is kind of a Warner Brothers movie, and that’s them also wanting it to be like, ‘Okay, Todd did his thing. Let Todd continue to do his thing.

Source Slash Film

Silver mentioned that the movie had already begun production before Gunn and Safran were appointed as co-heads of DC Studios, indicating that ‘Folie à Deux’ was in development prior to the establishment of the new department.

It’s quite clear that ‘Joker 2’ is not a DCU movie, and it’s also not a movie that belongs in the Batman Epic Crime Saga universe that Matt Reeves is successfully constructing. Fans were relieved by this news, and quite frankly so are we:

In any case, it doesn’t look like ‘Joker 2’ will manage to improve its ratings by much, as only 27% of people polled answered positively to whether they would recommend the movie to others.

What did you think about the movie? Let us know in the comments below!

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