Folie à Deux Trailer Is Hiding So Many Details

It’s become something of a trend for modern movie musicals to hide the fact that they are musicals at all during the early marketing process. Though one may be able to learn this information if they closely follow the trades, casual consumers can be caught off guard. So, if you didn’t know this already, allow us to break the news to you: «Joker: Folie á Deux» is reportedly a full-blown musical set to classic pop standards. We feel like we need to tell you this, because the sequel’s trailer certainly doesn’t.

This peculiar marketing strategy isn’t new for Warner Bros., which kept the fact that 2023’s «Wonka» is a musical under wraps when promoting it. That same year, the studio released a new adaptation of Alice Walker’s novel «The Color Purple.» The trailer stated that it was based on the 1892 novel of the same name, but didn’t mention that the film is actually a remake the Broadway adaptation, only showing a few seconds of song. And this sneaky approach goes back even further than that.

In 2007, the studio released a highly-anticipated adaptation of the popular stage musical «Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.» Yet, despite the fact that every theater kid had been humming along to the richly grotesque score of the Stephen Sondheim masterpiece for years at that point, Warner Bros. perplexingly tried to market the film as a straightforward thriller. One can’t help but wonder why Warner Bros. keeps making musicals if it doesn’t even have the confidence to market them as such.