How Warner Bros SHOULD Have Made A Joker Origin Movie
Or five different ones, to be precise...
No matter how many great actors join Joaquin Phoenix in The Joker Origin that Todd Phillips is making for Warner Bros - set apart from the DCEU - or how exciting the prospect of a Scorsese-influenced take on The Man Who Laughs might sound, there's always going to be something holding the entire project back.
The problem is that there will always be a significant number of Batman and The Joker fans who don't actually want a Joker origin.
3. Does The Joker Even Need An Origin?
It's firmly part of the character's magic that there's mystique in his mythology. Not knowing where he came from is as much his origin as any of the stories that purport to answer the question of where he came from. Hence how immediately iconic Heath Ledger's "do you want to know how I got these scars?" routine became in The Dark Knight Rises.
The lack of a definitive answer has always been considered key to his character's appeal. And sure, there have been answers in the comics, the nature of the medium is such that "definitive" doesn't carry the same weight. That's why character rebrands or returns from death are considered a normal comic book trope: it's a fluid world of possibilities.
Movies aren't the same, however. In movies, for the most part, one continuity exists at once and there's already some confusion over both Phoenix and Jared Leto playing the same character in different universes at roughly the same time. And that rigidity in perception means that audiences are likely to adopt whatever story Todd Phillips uses for his Joker Origin as the definitive one. It will be Ground Zero for the character.
But there is a rather ingenious way around that, which is the way - in an ideal world - Warner Bros SHOULD have made their Joker Origin movie. Or MOVIES to be more specific...