Lady Gaga Laughs Off Joker: Folie à Deux Backlash

Joker: Folie a Deux was supposed to ride the wave of a billion-dollar origin story and an Oscar-winning star. Instead, it face-planted. Now Lady Gaga is talking about the backlash, and her reaction is not what you might expect.

What happened, quick and clean

• The first Joker made over $1 billion worldwide and earned Joaquin Phoenix the Best Actor Oscar.
• Warner Bros. went back for seconds. The sequel pulled in $207.5 million worldwide on a budget that ballooned to about $200 million, and critics hammered it. That makes it one of 2024's biggest bombs.
• The story: Arthur Fleck is awaiting trial at Arkham State Hospital, where he falls into a romance with fellow inmate Lee (Gaga). As they get closer, the pair drift into fantasy musical numbers. Not exactly the sequel most fans pictured.
• Stars: Joaquin Phoenix and Lady Gaga. Director: Todd Phillips.

Gaga on the pile-on: she laughed, then channeled it

Talking to Rolling Stone about the negative reaction, Gaga said she did feel it, but her first instinct was to laugh at how extreme it got. She also admits the long tail of the discourse stung because she poured a lot of herself into the movie.

"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... When it takes a while for something to dissipate, that can be a little more painful. Only because I put a lot of myself into it."

She says the wave of negativity made her feel creatively defiant, and she redirected that energy straight into the very-dark music video for her song Disease.

"There was a ton of negativity around Joker. And I think I was feeling artistically rebellious at the time... I put so much of that energy into that video... I was like, 'I'll show you who I am, and I'll show you what this fight is like.'"

For what it is worth, Gaga has already shown she can take a joke about the movie too — she poked fun at Joker 2's Razzie wins during her SNL stint.

The movie we got vs. the movie people wanted

Folie a Deux leans hard into courtroom beats and fantasy musicals. If you were hoping for a straight-line continuation of the first film's grit, this was not that. The cost didn’t help either — $200 million for something this idiosyncratic is a big swing, and the numbers made the thud louder.

Critic Chris Bumbray summed up a lot of the mood by arguing the sequel exists because the first one was too big to ignore, not because the story demanded it.

"Perhaps Joker was too big of a hit not to get a sequel, but watching Joker: Folie a Deux, you get the distinct feeling that this was an exercise in style for Phillips rather than a sequel that HAD to be made... this Joker sequel spins its wheels and winds up being an often dull courtroom movie livened up by occasional flights of fancy into musical numbers. Those sequences are the best in the film, as without them, this would feel like a wholly unnecessary epilogue to what was originally a pretty powerful film."

Bottom line: the movie missed with critics and at the box office, but Gaga turned the noise into fuel. Whether you vibed with Folie a Deux or not, you can definitely see the fallout channeled straight into Disease.