Joker: Folie à Deux may have been a surprise damp squib at the box office this weekend, but its ending has gotten people talking regardless if they went out to see the sequel or not. And as controversial a conclusion as it is, apparently we almost got something similar in the original film’s climax… if not for a purported refusal from Christopher Nolan himself.
Folie à Deux climaxes with an imprisoned Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix), his trial concluded and awaiting the death sentence, being stabbed to death by a fellow inmate. As Arthur bleeds out, in the obscured background we see the inmate begin to cackle in a Joker-ish manner, before taking the knife to their own face and seemingly carving a smiling scar along their mouth, akin to the appearance of Heath Ledger’s Joker in The Dark Knight. As one Joker falls, another metaphorically rises. But a new report suggests that a version of that controversial moment almost came to pass in Todd Phillips’ original Joker movie.
As part of a new report at the Hollywood Reporter discussing the fallout of Folie à Deux‘s box office flop, the trade cites a source that alleged that the original script for the first Joker concluded with Arthur, standing before his gathered supporters, scarring himself in that familiar smile pattern. However, the idea was scrapped—not at Phillips’ behest, or even Warner Bros.’, but one of the studio’s other premier directors at the time, Christopher Nolan, who purportedly believed that only the late Heath Ledger’s incarnation of the Joker should be distinguished by the smile scar.
At the time of the first Joker, Nolan and Warner Bros. had an incredibly tight relationship—a relationship that would then distinctly sour in the wake of the 2020 covid-19 pandemic, when the director balked at Warner Bros.’ plans to put its 2021 theatrical slate on streaming day and date through the studio’s platform Max (then known by its full name, HBO Max). Already frustrated by the theatrical rollout of his time-bending film Tenet through Warner in 2020, Nolan was one of the most vociferous and notable directors who publicly lambasted the decision. Breaking his traditional distribution relationship with Warner Bros., he took his critically acclaimed smash hit Oppenheimer to Universal last year.
All that means that by the time that Folie à Deux was rolling around, Nolan wasn’t exactly in at Warner Bros. with the sway to nix at least someone getting scarred in the movie’s climax. Would the moment have been more controversial if it was Arthur’s Joker scarring himself, or is the wild ending twist more about how it sharply takes him out of the picture? We’ll never know now, but one thing’s for certain—don’t ask Chris Nolan how he feels about it, he almost definitely won’t tell you.
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