Joker: 10 1970s Comic Book Movies DC Should Make Next
2. Deathstroke As First Blood
The shadow of Vietnam looms large over the cinema of the 1970s and the damaged Vietnam veteran was one of the favourite stock characters for movies that, like Joker, focus on studies of tragically mentally unravelling characters.
It's easy to forget while watching the turgid Trumpian propaganda of Rambo: Last Blood that the character's original appearance in First Blood was not as a gung-ho action hero, but a stripped down story of a very damaged individual who is a violent anti-hero at best. (Like Joker-inspiration The King Of Comedy, First Blood was actually released in the early 1980s, but remains a "70s movie" in holding on to the tone and style of the recently-ended decade).
Despite it's importance in the American psyche in the latter part of the twentieth century, there are actually surprisingly few damaged Vietnam vets in the DC universe, but the origins of Deathstroke make him a perfect fit for his own First Blood-style story of a man with no real purpose in life beyond that of a killer.
Slade Wilson actually appeared in the comics a couple of years before Rambo did on film, but the similarities are obvious. Both became highly expert in guerrilla combat in the jungles of Vietnam, a skill that they bring back to fight American law enforcement. Both were moulded by the US Army into killing machines in elite special forces units and both were then essentially abandoned after undergoing the traumas of war.
They could even keep Joe Manganiello in the part, if he's disappointed that his Justice League post-credits cameo is clearly not going to lead anywhere.