Joker: Every Easter Egg & Reference We Spotted

3. The Dark Knight Returns

Joker's finale owes a massive debt to not only Scorsese's The King of Comedy but also The Dark Knight Returns, which had Joker book a guest spot on a late night talk show hosted by David Endocrine (a parody of David Letterman).

Once the show is on the air, The Joker then murders the entire crew and audience with poisonous gas before escaping. While this isn't actually the climax of the comic book and in the movie Arthur murders "only" one person, the influence is nevertheless self-evident.

In fact, the trailers played-up this imagery so blatantly that many assumed the film would end with Arthur killing the studio audience with gas, a bomb or a hail of machine-gun fire.