Warner Bros.
Despite the fact that Warner Bros. has hit all the right notes leading up to the release of Joker, I still harbor major reservations about the film.
What makes the Joker such a uniquely iconic villain is that the origins of his almost omnipresent levels of evil are essentially untraceable. It’s his absence of defined history that poses the most threatening existential crisis to Bruce Wayne’s life-defining crusade: can evil ever be stopped if anybody and everybody has it inside of them?
So, when Warner Bros. announced that the guy who directed The Hangover would be directing what amounts to a Joker origin story, I was concerned… to say the least.
Not only is the Joker a character whose entire aura is built around his lack of origin, but frankly, Warner Bros. didn’t deserve to be trusted with the character, especially with the way Jared Leto’s version turned out.
However, in the years since the film was announced, I’ve slowly but surely warmed to the idea, first and foremost due to the quality of the trailer.
Then, in a recent interview with Empire Magazine, director Todd Phillips discussed how he expects there to be a backlash to the film as they “didn’t follow anything” from the comics.
“We didn’t follow anything from the comic books, which people are gonna be mad about. We just wrote our own version of where a guy like Joker might come from. That’s what was interesting to me. We’re not even doing Joker, but the story of becoming Joker. It’s about this man.”
Of all the things Phillips could have said about the film, this is arguably the perfect description, as it shows he understands that trying to tell an origin story of the Joker that we know would be a fool’s errand.
Longtime Batman franchise producer Michael E. Uslan has also echoed that sentiment, saying that Joker will be unlike any comic book film they’ve seen before:
“I thought Guardians of the Galaxy was different and unique when it came out. I thought Deadpool was different and unique when it came out. This Joker movie is different and unique and it’s unlike any comic book movie you’ve ever seen,” Uslan said while speaking at Germany’s CCXP Cologne convention. [Comic Book]
Am I setting myself up to have my heart broken by Warner Bros. and DC once again (considering that Batman v. Superman, Suicide Squad, and Justice League were all trash)? Probably. But today — right now — I’ve officially come full circle on Joker from being all the way out to all the way in.
Joker will hit theaters in the United States on Friday, October 4.