I think if anyone had reservations about the standalone Joker movie, it wasn’t so much questioning Joaquin Phoenix’s ability as an actor to convey the character, but the question was why? Why did we need a solo film when we had Jared Leto in the DCEU? Before the MCU and the DCEU were formed, though; most films were standalone. We had standalone Batman, Superman, The Punisher, Blade, and even Catwoman movies. And the truth is, if anyone ever had any doubts, those should all have been dispelled when you watched the test footage from Todd Phillips’ The Joker.
Repost from #toddphillips1:
Camera test (w/ sound). Joker. pic.twitter.com/R9W2QqKwNS— Warner Bros. Pictures (@wbpictures) September 21, 2018
Produced by Martin Scorsese himself, The Joker will be an origin story that has a lower budget than what we’ve seen the DCEU produce thus far. Phoenix will play the Clown Prince himself and as we see from the test footage and behind the scene pictures, this is going to be a dark and twisted tale.
“I wouldn’t quite classify this as like any genre,” Phoenix said in a recent interview. “I wouldn’t say it’s a superhero movie, or a studio movie or a … It feels unique, and I think more then anything, and probably the most important thing, is Todd seems very passionate about it and very giving, and so that’s exciting. I think, underneath the excitement of these films, and the size of them, there are these incredible characters that are dealing with real life struggles. And sometimes that is uncovered and exposed, and sometimes it isn’t, and so I always felt, like, there were characters in comics that were really interesting and deserve the opportunity to be kind of studied. And so I think that’s what Todd sees appealing about this idea.”
Joaquin also stated that this is an idea that he has mulled over before:
“Three or four years ago, I called my agent and said ‘Why don’t they want to take one of these characters and just make a lower budget film about it, a movie but a character study, and why not take one of the villains?’” Phoenix revealed in a recent interview. “And I thought, ‘You can’t do the Joker, because, you know, it’s just you can’t do that character, it’s just been done.’ So I was trying to think of other characters, and he said ‘I’ll set up a general meeting with Warner Bros.’ And I said ‘I’m not gonna go, I can’t go to a general meeting.’ So I completely forgot about it, and so then I heard about this idea, I was like, ‘Oh that’s so exciting, that’s the kind of experience I wanted to have, with a movie based on a comic character.’ I felt like you could get something on screen.”
Now, as anyone knows, Heath Ledger’s Joker is legendary and I personally didn’t mind Leto’s, but if anyone is going to give us a performance worthy of Ledger’s or Mark Hamill, it’s going to be Phoenix.
The Joker is set to hit theaters October 4, 2019.