Batman: Every Movie Joker Reveal Ranked Worst To Best
Four Clown Princes Of Crime, but who did it best?
The age of the Internet has added heavy currency to the idea of the First Look. Particularly when a character as iconic as The Joker (or any comic book movie figure really, though he's a special case), it's inevitable that fans will scrabble furiously to get to see what they look like. If they didn't there wouldn't be any need for the paparazzi to sneak around sets and spoil as much as possible.
The problem with that sort of culture of leaks is that it robs a studio or a film-maker of the pomp and ceremony of showing off their key assets. And while fans might like to see things as early as possible, it also robs them of the same thing with the poor substitute of grainy footage or camera shots taken on the fly really not doing anything any justice.
Luckily, the Joker has mostly managed to negotiate that sort of leak reveal over his true cinematic appearances (the TV show's movie doesn't quite count the same as the Joker had debuted on the small screen) with Warner Bros unveiling four different versions now to differing success.
So which of the four cinematic Jokers was revealed in the best way and with the best impact?
4. Suicide Squad - Jared Leto
It's hard to overstate just how unfortunate the response was to the first official image of Jared Leto as the Joker. We'd already seen a look at him with green hair and gaunt while filming and Leto had been doing some of his own teasing on social media, but the full reveal was still something of a shock.
The image - clearly referencing the classic hands-on-head image from The Killing Joke - unveiled the controversial tattoos, which were all inspired in some way by the comics but were considerably less than the sum of their parts. It looked like someone had been at him with a Sharpie and the "Damaged" ink literally crowning the whole look was the absolute worst of it.
Without any moving elements, it also felt like Warner Bros had some perverse amount of misplaced confidence in the look too - as if the visual statement was going to be enough. It certainly generated column inches and social reactions, but the tide was absolutely not in their favour.