Joker has had a tremendous couple of weeks. Not only did the film receive an eight-minute standing ovation at the Venice Film Festival, it also shockingly received the festival’s top prize — The Golden Lion — the first time for a comic book movie. Going off the trailers, Joker looks to be a gritty, violent and deeply psychological film that explores the iconic Batman villain on a profound level. Previously, director Todd Phillips mentioned that he didn’t follow any particular story-arc from the comics and “just wrote our own version of where a guy like Joker might come from. That’s what was interesting to me. We’re not even doing Joker, but the story of becoming Joker.”
The early critical success of Joker has led people to wonder if Warner Bros would slowly bleed this film and its characters into the DC Extended Universe? After all, the likes of Aquaman and Shazam has shown us that there is a way to make standalone movies that also fit into the larger universe. However, it looks like that’s not going to happen. In an interview with Variety, director Todd Phillips was asked if he saw the worlds of Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker and Robert Pattinson’s The Batman colliding any time soon. The filmmaker firmly said, “definitely not.”
Phillips said the same thing during a Q&A session at the Toronto International Film Festival.
“I don’t see it connecting to anything in the future… This is just a movie.”
Official synopsis of Joker:
Director Todd Phillips Joker centres around the iconic arch nemesis and is an original, standalone fictional story not seen before on the big screen. Phillips’ exploration of Arthur Fleck, who is indelibly portrayed by Joaquin Phoenix, is of a man struggling to find his way in Gotham’s fractured society. A clown-for-hire by day, he aspires to be a stand-up comic at night…but finds the joke always seems to be on him. Caught in a cyclical existence between apathy and cruelty, Arthur makes one bad decision that brings about a chain reaction of escalating events in this gritty character study.
Joker is set to hit Malaysian cinemas on 3 October 2019.
