Joker has become the most successful Rated R movie of all time, and the fans are ready for a sequel. When the film was constructed, director Todd Phillips did not envision a sequel, but a billion-dollar box office hit may have changed his mind a little. While speaking at Deadline’s recent The Contenders New York award-season event, Phillips was asked a number of questions about the film. At one point, he was asked whether he thought Joker’s origins in the DC universe as Batman’s enemy had anything to do with the box office success. Phillips doesn’t think so.

“I think it was more than that,” he said. “I mean, I think there are themes in the movie that really resonated with people. None of us thought an R-rated movie could do over $1 billion across the world. But I think the themes in it really resonated. The thing Scott Silver and I set out to do when we wrote the movie together was to make something meaningful in that comic book space, but also something really that addressed what was going on in 2016, when we started writing. It’s pretty obvious what was happening in our country in 2017 while we were writing it, and really wanted to use Joker to make a movie about the loss of compassion and the lack of decorum in the world.”

Phillips was also asked about a potential sequel, to which he laughed. “When a movie does $1 billion and cost $60 million to make, of course it comes up,” he admitted while grinning. “But Joaquin and I haven’t really decided on it. We’re open. I mean, I’d love to work with him on anything, quite frankly. So who knows? But it would have to have a real thematic resonance the way this one did, ultimately being about childhood trauma and the lack of love, and the loss of empathy. All those things are really what made this movie work for us, so we’d have to have something that had an equal thematic resonance.” Check out the entire interview here.