10 Movie Origin Stories We Almost Got

10. The Joker Almost Had A Studio-Mandated Backstory - The Dark Knight

One of the defining aspects of The Dark Knight's Joker (Heath Ledger) is his ambiguous origin story, which consists entirely of the supervillain telling a few conflicting tales about how he got his grotesque facial scars.

Christopher Nolan made the smart decision to never settle on a concrete backstory for the Clown Prince of Crime, leaving fans free to speculate wildly forever more.

But this creative call did receive some worried responses from the big-wigs at Warner Bros., who felt that depriving audiences of The Joker's origins was a huge risk. Story writer David S. Goyer recently said of the internal reaction:

"I do remember when we were talking about, 'Well, what if the Joker doesn't really have an origin story?' Even after the success of Batman Begins, that was considered a very controversial thing. We got a lot of pushback. People were worried."

In the end the studio of course ceded to Nolan and Goyer's vision, but had they been a little more insistent upon a Joker prologue, the film absolutely would've featured it.