Warner Bros. Executives Reportedly Didn't Want Todd Phillips's JOKER to Feature The Joker
The executives at Warner Bros. were obviously very concerned about what Todd Phillips was going to do with DC’s villain The Joker in his film Joker. It took a lot of convincing them to greenlight the movie, they gave it a super low budget as a way to try to get Phillips to drop it, and some studios executives fought against his vision for the film. But for some crazy reason, Phillips actually got to make the film he wanted to make, and it was a super huge success!
A recent report from Vulture offers up some interesting new behind-the-scenes drama that went on while Phillips was planning his movie. During the development stage, a lot of the execs were questioning whether Joker should actually feature The Joker. It’s explained:
"Maybe, some of the executives reasoned, Phillips’s origin story could set up a character who audiences would understand is based on the Joker, but who isn’t literally the Joker. Couldn’t he be some kind of peripheral figure instead?"
"The idea divided the studio chieftains, but everyone agreed transposing the actual Joker from his more familiar context as the Dark Knight’s most infamous antagonist and placing him on his own within a mash-up of Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy was a risky move. Then there was the question of how it would resonate with DC Extended Universe fans, accustomed to straight-down-the-pike comics adaptations like Aquaman and Wonder Woman."
Well, it’s a good thing that didn’t happen! The whole thing about the Joker movie is the fact that it actually is about The Joker! It’s interesting to see how the studio saw this as a risky movie, especially after the success of films like Logan and Deadpool. A Joker movie like this doesn’t seem like a risky move to me. These are the kind of films that audiences want… obviously!
It just goes to show how out of touch these studio execs are with the audiences. If they knew their audience, they would have known Joker would be a success. They just have to trust the filmmakers and their audience. The film has now become the highest-grossing R-rated movie of all time!