JOKER: FOLIE Á DEUX Features Scene Originally Vetoed by Christopher Nolan for the First JOKER Movie

If you haven’t seen Joker: Folie à Deux yet, this article contains major spoilers for the ending of the film.

The Joker sequel takes Joaquin Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck on a very unique and surprising musical journey and it all leads to a very dark ending, which I think was expected for this Joker franchise.

Following his trial, Arthur is back in Arkham, and there he is told he has a visitor by a prison guard. As he walks away, another inmate calls out to him, telling him that he has a joke to tell.

As the inmate reaches the punchline, he ends up stabbing Arthur who starts bleeding out on the floor of the Asylum and that is followed by a blurred shot of the inmate carving his face in the background of the shot and he lets out a deep laugh. 

The Hollywood Reporter recently revealed that there was a scene similar to this that was planned for 2019’s Joker. In that scene in that film, Arthur was going to carve his own face in front of a crowd of supporters.

It turns out that Christopher Nolan was not a fan of this scene the vetoed it because he wanted to preserve Heath Ledger’s take on the Joker in The Dark Knight.

As you know, that iteration of Joker had a carved face and he told several different origin stories about how it happened. 

With Nolan no longer a part of Warner Bros., Joker director Todd Phillips went ahead and included the carved face moment in the film’s sequel, but it was obviously done in a different way than originally planned.