Will Joker Get A Sequel? Director Todd Phillips Clarifies His Thoughts

The highly anticipated Joker movie's release date is inching ever closer. Are you looking forward to seeing the infamous Batman villain finally starring in his own movie? Let us know in the comments below.

The Joaquin Phoenix-starring Joker movie is still weeks away, but conversations about the possibility of a sequel have been going on for some time now. Back in August, headlines around the internet suggested Joker director Todd Phillips was already considering plans for Joker 2. But at an event after a Joker screening in Los Angeles recently, Phillips took the opportunity to set the record straight.

"It's so annoying," Phillips told GameSpot, when asked about his earlier comments concerning a sequel. "You say one thing and it becomes the story for 24 hours."

"Why don't you want to work with me again?" Phoenix, who was also present, teased the director in response.

Phillips continued, "The quote was, 'I will do anything Joaquin wants to do.' And I would. But the movie's not set up to [have] a sequel. We always pitched it as one movie, and that's it."

The director, perhaps best known for The Hangover--and its multiple sequels--said he was speaking "jokingly" when he told Total Film (published online via sister site GamesRadar) that he and Phoenix could come up with "something pretty cool" for a potential Joker 2.

This time, Phillips was clear that he was speaking purely hypothetically.

"We have no plan for a sequel," the director said. "We made this movie, I pitched it to Warner Bros. as one movie, it exists in its own world, that's it. It's not about worldbuilding, it's not about other versions, it's like, here's our version of the origin story, that's it. That's what I meant."

This version of Joker exists separately from DCEU movies like Wonder Woman, Aquaman, and Justice League--a fact Phillips has been clear about. But at the Toronto International Film Festival recently, the director also insisted that Phoenix's Joker and the upcoming new iteration of Batman played by Robert Pattinson will not collide. "I don't see [Joker] connecting to anything in the future," Phillips said. "This is just a movie."

That doesn't seem to suggest that a sequel to this movie is totally out of the question, but there are certainly more factors involved than Todd Phillips and Joaquin Phoenix deciding it would be a laugh. That said, the reviews for Joker so far have been largely positive, and anything is possible in the future. The movie has scored a 70 on Metacritic as of the time of writing.

In GameSpot's Joker review, we said that "Joker succeeds, without equivocation, because it transforms the villain into the populist antihero we need him to be now. Joker wears its influences on its maroon sleeves, but it also carves its own gashes through the blood-soaked landscape of contemporary comic book movies, offering something that, despite teetering on the shoulders of 80 years of history, is wonderfully fresh, dangerously exciting, undeniably entertaining, and rock-solid in its artistry. It might make you uncomfortable, and it will no doubt stay with you long after the curtains close; great movies often do."

Joker hits theaters October 4. In semi-related news, The Suicide Squad director James Gunn recently revealed the cast list for his Suicide Squad sequel, and it's a doozy.