What Does The Ending Of Joker REALLY Mean?
3. Batman Begins
Intriguingly, one of the biggest changes Joker makes to the comics material is how it portrays Thomas Wayne and how that leads into the surprise inclusion of Batman's origin story. Wayne is a painted as an unsympathetic corporate monster, who calls the protesting lower class "clowns" who need to be saved from themselves. He's your typical out of touch fat cat and he's behind all of Gotham's unrest. Him or people like him.
In the end, then, his death at the hands of one of the protestors as Gotham falls into open uproar and rioting is seen more as form of justice, rather than the traditional idea of it being a criminal tragedy that robs Bruce Wayne of his wholly innocent parents.
However we get there, the climax shows us the infamous Batman origin as Bruce is seen standing over the dead bodies of his parents. So for all of the talk of this being a totally stand-alone movie, this could very easily be the story that leads to the Bruce Wayne we will meet in Matt Reeves' The Batman.
And rather wonderfully, that also means that a film involving BOTH Robert Pattinson's Batman and Joaquin Phoenix's Joker could be possible. And it really, really needs to happen.
There's an interesting new element in there too, because this version of the origin completely changes Bruce Wayne too. Rather than him being the victim of a crime that killed his innocent parents, he's going to be fighting on behalf of the people his father represented against the people that hated him. In other words, rather than fighting crime and corruption on behalf of the downtrodden, Batman could be doing the opposite.
Obviously, a lot will change in the time before Bruce becomes Batman, but how he reconciles the fact that his father was killed for being a perceived monster and that his killers are victims of a failing society is very interesting to consider.