Joker: Folie à Deux is experiencing the rare Holy Trinity of cinematic failure: a critical thrashing, box office flopping, and fan outrage. Now, in the wake of the film’s disastrous opening weekend, people are piling on, mocking the film in memes online.
With Folie à Deux, a sequel to 2019’s Joker, earning less than half of its predecessor’s opening weekend tally—falling way short of early projections for the once-buzzy movie—everyone who had been excited for the film is left wondering: What happened? How did the follow-up to a popular, Oscar-winning movie that not only enlisted Lady Gaga as the female lead, but gave her multiple musical numbers to perform, tank this spectacularly?
Speculation has run rampant online that many of the scenes that Lady Gaga filmed for Folie à Deux were left on the cutting room floor. (To the extent that there’s been a call to “release the Gaga cut.”)
Two different videos of Lady Gaga and star Joaquin Phoenix reacting to the movie have gone viral because they hint that the pair may think the film is “horrible,” as some lip-readers have surmised from the footage of Phoenix. And when an interviewer asked them what they thought of the final cut, they looked at each other and laughed awkwardly, which only fuels that theory.
Anecdotally, most people I’ve talked to who have seen the movie bemoaned that, in the end, it was just boring. That the theatrical naptime could have been shaken awake by more Gaga—she spends a major stretch of the film sitting on a courtroom bench with extras watching the action—is made evident by the response to how jarring the musical numbers are in the film’s current version.
Who knows if scenes providing more context are among those that were excised, but people on social media have made a meme out of mocking the film’s jarring tonal shifts.
Users on X are making fun of segments of the film where Joker confesses his dark suicidal thoughts to Gaga’s Lee, and then immediately after the two are performing a musical dream sequence set to jazzy, upbeat numbers from the Great American Songbook.
The social media trend has users cheekily imagining other inappropriate musical numbers Lee could perform beyond the ones in the film. Here’s a roundup of some of the suggestions. At the very least, the film’s box-office flop is providing us with a good laugh:
