DC wants to do a Joker origin story.

…Umm, OK?

Warner Bros and DC are in the early stages of another Batman Universe spinoff movie, this one telling the origin story of the signature villain The Joker. The studio has set The Hangover‘s Todd Phillips to co-write a script with 8 Mile scribe Scott Silver. Phillips will direct the movie, and Martin Scorsese will produce it with Phillips. This will be the first film under a new banner that has yet to be named in which WB can expand the canon of DC properties and create unique storylines with different actors playing the iconic characters.

(Via NerdBastards) Maybe I was spoiled by the Heath Ledger Joker.  Oh, who am I kidding?  I was totally spoiled by the Heath Ledger Joker. But I think that The Dark Knight handled this perfectly, in that the movie adamantly refused to give a true, definitive origin for the character. It didn’t matter.  The Joker was there because he wanted to watch the world burn.

The origin was always an excuse, in other words.  Dropped in a vat of chemicals that bleached his skin white and made his hair green? Yeah, sure, that’s what made the man into a criminal psychopath with a taste for deadly humor. Not the fact that he was already awful (which is the smart thing that the Tim Burton Batman did). It’s like what appears to have happened with Hannibal Lecter: to wit, more and more explanations as to why the villain ended up that way, when all we really cared about was what the villain did. I say ‘appears’ because I stopped reading the books and skipped watching any of the sequels to The Silence of the Lambs, once it became clear that this was on the agenda.

Let those with eyes see, and understand.

8 thoughts on “DC wants to do a Joker origin story.”

  1. Moe, there’s another part of this story that you missed: This isn’t a DCEU movie. This doesn’t bode well for the Justice League movie.

      1. So .. it’s a completeists’ film?
        .
        Gets seen by the hardcore fans, then gets acquired on DVD or whatever by well-meaning grandparents who don’t know their grandkids’ actual taste or by people collecting “everything Gal Godot was in” ..
        .
        Could be worse .. have they got Uwe Boll onboard?
        .
        Mew

  2. I guess they didn’t exactly read their own comics. The whole point of The Killing Joke is that Joker have no origin story.

    1. Yes and no. The whole “Red Hood, vat of chemicals” thing is pretty much undisputed, and at this point, pretty much undisputable. That IS the origin story. What isn’t filled in are the details around the edges — this guy’s name, why he was in the Red Hood costume in the first place, et cetera.
      .
      If they wanted to do a take-off on The Killing Joke where they present several different versions of the basic story, some of which share similar features but none of which is completely compatible with the other, that would be interesting to me…though not, I suspect, to most people. But if they want to do a definitive story, count me out.

  3. There have been so many reboots and re-imaginings by greedy executive and egotistic writers looking to ‘put their stamp’ on things in the last 30 years that every hero’s (and villain’s) origin is now muddled, even Superman’s. perhaps most bizarrely there was an arc a few years ago implying Joker was some kind of immortal chaos demon responsible for mass deaths throughout the recorded history of Gotham, a completely unoriginal storyline that could have been (/was) stolen from Steven King’s ‘IT’ or any of a dozen other writers short and long form work.

  4. If the Joker is sometimes remembering his origin one way, sometimes another, they can make *lots* of Joker Origin movies.

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