After the release of Endgame and Far From Home it’s starting to look like nothing will remove Marvel off the podium and take their place as gods of the silver screen, but could that all change with Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker?
Due to be released in the US on October 4th, this movie is set to take a look at how a failed comedian in 1981 can fall into the spiral of crime and chaos and come out the other end with a smile on his face, giving birth to the cult villain that everyone knows and loves.
This version of the Joker, being a man who suffers from a mental illness, and in so turns to violence, proves to be a completely different version than anything that we’ve yet to see. Whether its Heath Ledger’s who just wanted wanted to watch the world burn, the pimping Jack Nicholson, or my personal favorite Mark Hamill who voices the role in The Killing Joke, this should be a lot more of a psychological thriller.
So how is this going to impact upon Marvel?
With this new rendition of the Joker being a standalone movie with no planned sequel, it will help launch new line of films from the DC Black world, which is DC’s replacement for Vertigo that shall be shutting production in 2020. This means the movies will be much more adult and dark which is great since that’s where DC thrives, and with this one having an R rating that gives them something else they haven’t been able to do yet, and the only time we see that in Marvel is in Deadpool.
The DCEU are starting to focus director and producer driven films based on individual characters, rather than ensemble movies as part of a shared universe that can take away the chance for real character development, this is a smart move on their behalf with their last three ensemble movies, Batman V Superman, Suicide Squad and Justice League, all falling short. We should also hope to see the same attention paid to Robert Pattinson’s Batman trilogy. Looking at a lot of the Marvel movies, the more successful ones are their ensemble ones, whereas DC does better when they’re left alone.
Another thing they can do that Marvel can’t is keep it cheap.
With movies like Ant-Man and the Wasp costing $162-195 million to make, Joker has a budget of just $55 million. Without having to rely on green screens and editing, everything that you see is filmed on location in New York City, Jersey City and Newark. In an interview with Empire Magazine, Todd Phillips the director said “The energy you get from an actor is different on 179th Street and Jerome Avenue in the Bronx than if we did that with green screen, which, by the way, I don’t even know how to do shit like that. There’s not one green screen in this movie.” and because of that we should get something that looks a lot more real.
So if you were looking at low cost movies i think the best example is David Yarovesky and James Gunn’s Brightburn. This movie only cost $6-12 million to make and is a perfect example of how you can still do something really well with very little, and i think they really hit the nail on the head, and once Gunn is finished with the new Suicide Squad and Guardians 3, I look forward to seeing the earth run red with the blood of humankind in Brightburn 2.
End of the day i was quite skeptical when i first heard about this project, but the more I hear about it, this could just be the thing that DC need to lift their spirits and help them get out of Marvel’s shadow.
Director Todd Phillips ‘Joker’ centers 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.
Source: Empire Magazine
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