So if you haven't heard the news by now, Warner Brothers is supposedly trying to put together a "hard boiled" (as opposed to all of the lighthearted Jokers we've had in the past) origin story for the Joker, produced by Martin Scorsese and inspired by the style of his 80s crime dramas.
This is a terrible f--king idea for many reasons. I won't even go into my usual rant on how Warner Brothers biggest problem is that they still do not understand or care about any of the stable of DC characters they have (as evidenced by how they undersold and showed zero faith in Wonder Woman and seemed shocked as hell that it succeeded like it did), and thus they are forever trying to reboot the only characters who have ever made them money before (Batman, Joker, etc). Just looking beyond the fact that DC has roughly 5 million characters who could make excellent vehicles for solo films if the company only believed in them the way Marvel believed in a talking tree, here are four reasons this is a terrible idea just because of how badly it misunderstands the character of the Joker:
1) The Joker's origin is best as a mystery
Yes, we got a Joker origin all of the way back in the 1940s, one that was famously re-visited by Alan Moore in The Killing Joke. Even TKJ left it open, however, as to whether this was actually the real origin ("If I have a past, I prefer it to be multiple choice") and later versions of the character have retconned this out of existence entirely. The current comics Joker as written by Scott Snyder was previously the Red Hood, but even then no one knew the Red Hood's identity, he was already a rotten bastard, and even then Snyder makes it clear that the Red Hood we see fall into the vat of chemicals may not even be the same Red Hood that we'd seen Batman battling over the previous couple of issues, and instead may have been someone who took his place at the last moment. There are a number of competing theories thrown out as to who the Joker may have been during the Endgame storyline, but ultimately the best conclusion is the one Batman draws: it doesn't matter who he was, all that matters is who he is now. This is the same approach Christopher Nolan took, and I think we can all agree that one worked out pretty well.
2)He should never have been a good guy
I have to assume if we're getting an entire movie of origin story before he becomes Joker, he is at some point the protagonist of this story, maybe even a sympathetic figure. The Killing Joke's story was of a failed comedian who is driven by the death of his wife and his fall into the tank of chemicals into complete insanity. "One bad day" is enough to drive us all to evil. If the movie takes this approach we'll likely see the rise and fall of the man who would be Joker. Frankly, I hate that, and it's an origin that works better with Harvey Dent.
The Joker works best as someone who has always been evil, and saw his transformation as a chance to shed any remaining humanity and embrace his role as an agent of chaos. That's far scarier than the One Bad Day Driving a Man to Insanity approach. The insanity almost deprives him of responsibility for his evil. It's far scarier to deal with those people who just actively choose evil and laugh at those of us trying to make something good and worthwhile out of it all. He should never be an even remotely tragic figure who was good once. He should be the avatar for the evil that lurks everywhere and has to be held back at every opportunity.
3)Let's not do the Jack Napier thing again
Jack Nicholson is rightly lauded as one of the highpoints of Batman 89. He's a genuine delight in that movie, but the character succeeds because Jack Nicholson is great, not because that conception of the Joker is great. He's actually one of the more boring and mundane takes on the character we've ever gotten. If this Joker is going to be similar to Jack Napier, a mobster who basically gets his skin dyed white and continues to basically act like the same mobster, with the same mobster aims (control a criminal empire, make money, get women), there's really no point to the story. There's no lesson to be taken from his fall, nor does he really say anything about the nature of evil.
4) Joker shouldn't exist before Batman
This is my big beef with the entire show Gotham, actually (well, plus the fact that it sucks). The general timeline laid out by Batman: Year One and also shown in origins like Zero Year or Batman Begins is Batman starting his war in order to defeat organized crime. Once he's done that or nearly done that, and cleaned up the streets of Gotham, new crime in the form of supervillains emerges in order to combat the Batman and also justify Batman's perpetual existence. The Joker is the ultimate reaction to Batman. He should never appear before Batman. Any movie that ends with the Joker's creation before the arrival of Batman basically makes Batman a reaction to the Joker rather than vice versa, which diminishes Bruce's agency and makes his mission less something he chose on behalf of his city and more a desperate bid to stop a killer clown.
There are so many stories left in the Batman universe and far, far, far more stories in the greater DC universe that should be told before diving into the origin of a character who is honestly better without one. I hope this is yet another of the hundred or so DC movie projects announced over the last decade that will likely never see the light of day. Still, it could be worse. They could announce three more movies with that awful Jared Leto Joker.
*intern whispers in my ear*
Oh, oh god no.
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