I swear Todd Phillips made this movie as an f*** you to WB. It seems fairly evident that he didn't want to do a Joker sequel (he had something else in mind which WB flatly said no to) so when WB approached him, he countered with a ridiculous offer of making it a musical. They said yes, because they are idiots who didn't think much beyond the first one pulling in a billion dollars, simple research showed it would bomb just on the basis of it being a musical. WB thought they had a franchise on their hands with the Joker when the actual franchise is what Phillips wanted to do and that was to make similar "real-world" movies featuring other Batman villains.
@feral411: Not really a spoiler if you understand the Joker and his muddled history. DC canon states there are at least three Jokers, the Gotham TV series had at least two, maybe more, the comics have covered a lot of Jokers in Elseworlds tales, Fleck being one of them, even Nicholson and Ledger were very different characters. All of them are the real Joker and none of them are.
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