Last week I wrote about a confusing, confounding tale. A tale of how Warner Bros is planning a Joker origin film (not to be confused with Suicide Squad 2 or the Harley Quinn & Joker spinoff also in the works). The New Joker film will be written and directed by Todd Phillips of Hangover Trilogy fame, and will not exist in DCEU alongside ‘Wonder Woman’ and ‘Justice League’. Like I said at the start of this: Confusing. One of the more peculiar details about this whole story is how Martin Scorsese is a part of the project as a producer, and today we might have found out the odd reason why.
The Hollywood Reporter is saying the big hope at Warner Bros is that having Scorsese, the legendary filmmaker behind ‘Goodfellas’, ‘Raging Bull’ & ‘The Wolf of Wall Street’, on board will entice his frequent collaborator Leonardo DiCaprio to play the Joker in this new origin film. This is an interesting idea, albeit one that I would almost guarantee will never happen.
Remember when McG was doing press for ‘Terminator: Salvation’ and saying that Daniel Day-Lewis was his first choice for the lead? This story feels very similar. DiCaprio is one of the biggest stars in hollywood and while he has been involved with big budget blockbusters in the past, I don’t see him leading one of the two competing Joker movies simply because Scorsese is a producer in name only on the film.
These stories coming out of DC and Warner Bros seem to get stranger and stranger each day. We’re either hearing about Matt Reeves wanting a new batman; or we’re hearing that now Jared Leto is upset about a multiverse of Jokers; or we’re hearing about how DC has scrapped(or pushed back) the Harley Quinn ‘Gotham City Sirens’ movie to make a Harley & Joker film. It honestly seems like ‘Wonder Woman’ was a true miracle of a film, because Warners doesn’t seem to know how to run their comic properties, and they really don’t know how to handle the successful wave their riding right now.
