The Joker Reveal: Reactions To Joaquin Phoenix's Killer Clown

3. I Struggle To Care

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Warner Bros

[Scott Tailford]

I… struggle to care. Like yes, Joaquin Phoenix is a wall-to-wall badass and yes, the leaked footage of him in costume, doing Joker-type things in a train station is neat, but… does anyone want The Joker without Batman?

Atop that, does anyone WANT to care? The whole “Joker origin story!” feels like it was cooked up by a Hollywood Big Bucks algorithm. Take “origin story”, “beloved character”, “comic history” and voila, a movie that ticks all the right boxes… except for necessity.

Now, props to Phoenix and Warner Bros. for their handling of the project. Nobody in the world saw Heath Ledger’s Joker coming, and the approach to Phoenix’s incarnation has mostly been shrouded in secrecy. Many of us didn’t even know it was definitely happening until that first still image emerged, and then we’ve had leaked footage confirming Joaquin’s body language is spot-on for a clown-turned-psychopath.

I cannot stress how much my thoughts are just mining “meh” into however many words are necessary for a given context, but I sure hope it works out, if only because we might get another Ledger-level Joker for a suitably weighty Batman to take on.

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