Joaquin Phoenix rumored offered huge salary for Joker movies:
Joker turned out to be the biggest R-Rated movie of all time as it earned over a Billion Dollars. It also defeated The Dark Knight, so that made it the King of all Joker movies. And the fact that it was made on such a low budget helped everyone’s cause. Its production budget was just around 55-$60 Million and that allowed it to be the most profitable comic book movie ever. It turned in a profit of over $500 Million for Warner Bros. When a film makes so much money, it usually tends to get sequels. That’s how Hollywood has been working for the last decade or so. So, despite all the people saying that Joker will not be getting any sequels, there are now rumors for not one, but two more Joker movies.
Everyone around the first film made so much money. Joker director Todd Phillips had a backend deal with Warner Bros. which allowed him to earn a total that was north of $100 Million. Now that’s just insane if you compare it with Joaquin Phoenix’s payday. Apparently, he was paid a $4.5 million salary. That’s actually good for a low budget movie, but compared to the kind of performance that Phoenix delivered and the amount of money that the film made, it was low. Well, it’s needless to say that it generated a lot of goodwill and Phoenix won the best actor awards at almost every award show. And now, Joaquin Phoenix may be in for the biggest payday of his career.
The Mirror reports the idea of two more Joker movies coming our way in the next 4 years. So yes, we could have 4 DC movies in 2022. Anyway, what’s crazy is that Phoenix is being offered $50 Million to star in Joker 2 and Joker 3. An inside source of The Mirror told them:
“Joaquin initially felt Joker was a standalone movie.
But he’s changed his tune now. He says he wants to play this character again, despite the controversies that came with the release last year.
It’s still being negotiated but the scripts are being written and Joaquin is very engaged with it.
They plan to make two sequels in the next four years, with a long-term commitment to Joaquin and his Joker director Todd Phillips and producer Bradley Cooper. It’s all about getting Joaquin to accept the terms – and the biggest payday of his career by far.”
It would be awesome if Phoenix agrees. It won’t make a lot of sense if he doesn’t. Yes, it could be argued that Joker was sort of made as a one-off film and the open ending totally suggests that. But, where the sequel could take this story has already been suggested in the past. The second movie could have Joker break out of Arkham and this time he’d be in his complete Joker form. We could see a teenage Bruce by this time growing up with vengeance in his heart. And then the third movie could finally pit Joker against Batman. Obviously, a couple of time jumps will be included in the 2 sequels because that’s how Bruce Wayne will grow up. Ultimately, it will mean that when Bruce turns into Batman, he will take on an older Joker who is somewhere between 45-50 years of age.
All this could happen if the Joker franchise takes the Batman route. Considering that 3 Batmen will already be running around on the big screen by the time Joker 3 comes out, Todd Phillips might want to do something different. They could just have Arthur & Bruce Wayne confront each other once again when Bruce becomes a man. Let’s wait and see how things will turn out.
We could expect the next two Joker movies to have bigger budgets. They may or may not break the records that the first film ended up creating, but we’d surely like to see a trilogy derived out of this franchise regardless of that. It all depends upon Joaquin Phoenix, and we do believe that he’d agree to return.
