The director of DC’s incredibly popular Joker movie has ended the debate about whether a certain character in the film lived or died. READ ON BELOW FOR THE SPOILER-Y DETAILS.
A significant plot point in Joker is the relationship that Arthur (Joaquin Phoenix) has with his neighbor, Sophie (Zazie Beetz). Arthur and Sophie fall fast in love, or so the movie would you have think. In reality, Arthur’s entire relationship with Sophie was in his mind.
This comes to a head when, in the second half of the movie, Arthur visits Sophie in her apartment and she is alarmed, given they had no relationship in reality.
The movie then shows Arthur walking down the hallway with no resolution–and this is the last time we see Sophie. Some viewers wondered if Arthur killed Sophie. He did not, Phillips–who also wrote Joker–confirmed to IndieWire.
“He doesn’t kill her, definitively,” Phillips said. “As the filmmaker and the writer I am saying he doesn’t kill her. We like the idea that it’s almost like a litmus test for the audience to say, ‘How crazy is he?'”
“Most people that I’ve spoken to think he didn’t kill her because they understand the idea that he only kills people that did him wrong,” he added. “She had nothing to do with it. Most people understood that, even as a villain, he was living by a certain code. Of course he didn’t kill this woman down the hall.”
Phillips did not always plan to be ambiguous about what happened to Sophie. He revealed that an earlier draft of the movie showed Sophie– alive and well in her apartment–watching the interview that Arthur gave to Murray Franklin (Robert De Niro), which would have confirmed she was still alive.
The fate of Sophie was already confirmed by cinematographer Lawrence Sher, but this is seemingly the first time that Phillips himself is addressing it.
Joker has made almost $940 million at the box office, which makes it a tremendous success given it was produced on a $70 million budget. It is the highest-grossing R-rated movie in history.
Joker is expected to enter a new stratosphere of success soon, as box office projections estimate it will hit $1 billion over the coming weekends. If it can cross $1 billion, it would become just the fourth DC movie ever to reach that number, joining The Dark Knight ($1.004 billion), The Dark Knight Rises ($1.081 billion), and Aquaman ($1.148 billion).