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.
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.
