With the screenplay for Todd Phillips’ Joker now officially online, fans can gain some fresh insight on one of the year’s darkest and most profitable franchise films. For one thing, the script written by Phillips and Scott Silver tells what Arthur Fleck’s one-sided love interest Sophie Dumond was doing while the Joker was busy killing Murray Franklin.
In the theatrical cut, the Sophie subplot is resolved after Joaquin Phoenix’s character wanders into her apartment and realizes that their relationship was just a product of his imagination. Unnerved by his presence, Sophie tells Arthur to leave, and he quickly obliges.
What we don’t see in the actual film, however, is the part where Arthur invites Zazie Beetz’s character to watch his climactic TV appearance. The section begins with our lead sitting in his kitchen finishing a misspelled note that reads, “…on Murray Franklin Tonight — Pleese Watch!”
Arthur then stuffs the note into an envelope addressed to “SOFI,” along with the money he took from his late coworker Randall, before going down the hallway of his building and leaving both the envelope and his wand of magic flowers at Sophie’s door.
Apparently, Beetz’s character received Arthur’s message, since the script later cuts briefly to Sophie screaming as she watches the death of Murray Franklin on live TV. While it was always clear that the Joker wanted to have an audience for his crime, it seems he specifically hoped that Sophie was watching while it happened.
Right now, it’s hard to say if we’ll ever see Sophie on our screens again, but now that Joker has crossed the billion-dollar mark at the global box office, you have to imagine that the bosses at Warner Bros. are weighing their options. Between this and Deadpool 2’s Domino, that apparently makes two Beetz characters who may or may not have a future in their respective comic book franchises.