Lady Gaga Laughs as Joker: Folie à Deux Reactions Go Off the Rails

Joker blew the doors off the box office and became one of the biggest R-rated hits ever, so yeah, Joker: Folie a Deux had a pretty tall mountain to climb. It didn’t get there. The sequel landed with a thud for a lot of people, and Lady Gaga — who plays Harleen 'Lee' Quinzel, Arthur’s on-again, off-again obsession — says the weird, loud backlash was so over-the-top she actually laughed at first.

'I wasn’t, like, unfazed. It’s funny, I’m almost nervous to share my reaction. But the truth is, when it first started happening, I started laughing. Because it was just getting so unhinged.'

That’s Gaga in Rolling Stone, talking about what it’s like to be at the center of a movie that split the room this hard. She also admits the criticism lingered long enough to sting — not because she can’t take heat, but because she poured a lot of herself into it and it didn’t blow over quickly.

So why did Folie a Deux throw people?

Short version: it zigged where Joker zagged. The first film pulled in audiences with grim, violent chaos and a claustrophobic descent into Arthur Fleck’s head. Folie a Deux — from director Todd Phillips, again co-writing with Scott Silver — swings big in a different direction. It’s a musical. The movie trades Hildur Gudnadottir’s suffocating, gorgeous string score for full-blown set pieces and theatrical spectacle. It’s brighter, bolder, and way more stylized. If you were expecting the same bruised, low-frequency dread, you got something else entirely.

• Rotten Tomatoes score: 31% with both critics and audiences
• Worldwide box office: a little over $207 million
• The first Joker: north of $1 billion and one of the top-grossing R-rated films ever
• Co-writers: Todd Phillips and Scott Silver
• Gaga’s role: Harleen 'Lee' Quinzel (a spin on Harley), opposite Joaquin Phoenix’s Arthur, largely inside Arkham

The performance vs. the reception

Here’s the thing: Gaga does not phone this in. She’s electric opposite Joaquin Phoenix, especially in the musical numbers, and the two carve out something raw and strange inside Arkham’s bleak corridors. But the gap between what the sequel wanted to be and what a chunk of Joker fans wanted to see was wide. The numbers reflect it: sitting at 31% on Rotten Tomatoes and finishing around $207 million worldwide is a steep drop from a billion-plus phenomenon.

Gaga’s take is pretty straightforward: the noise got absurd enough to be funny at first, then the slow burn of it got a little painful because she invested so much into the role. That tracks. You can be proud of the work and still feel the drag when the discourse won’t die.

What’s next

Gaga heads back to theaters next year in The Devil Wears Prada 2. Different sandbox, different energy — and probably a lot less screaming about whether or not something should have been a musical.