Like an old, beloved car that doesn't quite run the way it's supposed to, the Batman movie franchise has sat in Hollywood's garage for the better part of the past year while various writers and directors tinker with him and new takes in other media come along at a steady clip.
Two GQ.com writers argue about Telltale Games' The Enemy Within, a subversive riff on an overexposed superhero.
Yesterday news broke that the latest Bat-idea to come out of Hollywood was a Joker origin film, to be directed and co-written by The Hangover and War Dogs director Todd Phillips and co-produced by Phillips and...Martin Scorsese.
Before you get too excited or confused by that last bit, it's worth noting that The Hollywood Reporter's Borys Kit has reported that Scorsese's involvement is still "early and fluid," so don't count on him being a strong creative voice on this Joker project. The biggest news about this movie is that it's actually moving away from the DC universe, and meant to be an entirely standalone film unaffected by other DC movies, and also completely unrelated to the Joker that has appeared in Suicide Squad and may appear in its forthcoming sequel.
While that decision is an incredibly interesting and welcome one, it's hard to get excited about it when said film is explicitly a Joker origin film. Here's why.
Batman has something of a villain problem, but not in the sense that most franchises and characters do. Batman's villains are largely too good, and as a result, they overshadow Batman. The Joker, in turn, overshadows all of them. Two-Face, The Riddler, Mr. Freeze, Bane—they all have to make way for the Clown Prince of Crime.
The Joker's popularity is easy to explain—he's a well-loved villain precisely because he's a cipher, a character that has reinvention baked into his backstory. Countless Joker stories have riffed on this—Alan Moore and Brian Bolland's graphic novel The Killing Joke puts forth the closest thing to a definitive origin for the character that comics have gotten, but also makes its account an unreliable one. (Joker himself makes that unreliability textual, saying, "If I have to have a past, I prefer it be multiple choice!") This is a recurring meme in comics—in the aughts, writer Grant Morrison's Batman comics posited that reinvention was an integral part of the Joker's psyche; last year, in DC Comics Rebirth #1 writer Geoff Johns posited the wild (and unresolved) idea that maybe there isn't one Joker but three. It's no mistake that The Dark Knight, which gave us the most famous and enduring version of the notorious villain, includes multiple origin stories for the character that are likely all lies.
As a result, you can do pretty much anything with the Joker, and it's more or less fine and works. The Dark Knight's positioning of the character as "an agent of chaos" is probably as close as you can get to a Unifying Theory of Joker when you're working with such a malleable character, and while that seems like a strength, it also means he's not the best pure antagonist for a character as stoic and ideologically driven as Batman. This is also something The Dark Knight accounted for, which was why the movie was more or less entirely about Harvey Dent.
This is why a Joker origin movie is such a questionable idea: You're removing that ambiguous malleability that attracts people to the character to begin with. Of course, questionable ideas can and do lead to good movies all the time—the careers of Lego Movie and 21 Jump Street directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller are pretty much a testament to this. But when it comes to story potential, you want to go to where the most potential is, and for Joker, that potential has never been in his origin. As with a good joke, the easiest way to flub the Joker is by explaining him.