Joker is based on the DC Comics villain of the same name
Joker is scheduled for release on October 4, 2019
Joker movie would be separate from the DC film universe, in which Jared Leto would continue to play the character for the time being. Starring Joaquin Phoenix in the titular role, Joker is only based on the DC Comics villain of the same name. Joker’s director Todd Phillips has teased the beginning of the movie’s production with an Instagram photo of him. He captioned the image as, “Here we go,” perhaps referencing one of Heath Ledger’s Joker’s lines from The Dark Knight.
Joaquin Phoenix himself described the film to Collider in July. He said, “Three or four years ago, I called my agent and said ‘Why don’t they want to take one of these characters and just make a lower budget film about it, a movie but a character study, and why not take one of the villains?’ And I thought, ‘You can’t do the Joker, because, you know, it’s just you can’t do that character, it’s just been done.’ So I was trying to think of other characters, and he said ‘I’ll set up a general meeting with Warner Bros.’ And I said ‘I’m not gonna go, I can’t go to a general meeting.’ So I completely forgot about it, and so then I heard about this idea, I was like, ‘Oh that’s so exciting, that’s the kind of experience I wanted to have, with a movie based on a comic character.’ I felt like you could get something on screen.”
The film has a prestige cast and is different from the usual comic book movie fare. Robert De Niro, Zazie Beetz, Frances Conroy and Marc Maron are confirmed to be in the film. With the expected budget of 55 million dollars, Joker is far behind most comic book movies being made today in terms of money being spent on it. To give you an idea, Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers 4 jointly have an estimated budget of 1 billion dollars.
Instead of having explosions and special effects like other comic-book based movies, Joker will be a dark character study of a single character, as Joaquin Phoenix has explained before. The synopsis says that the film “centres around the iconic arch nemesis and is an original, standalone story not seen before on the big screen. Phillips’ exploration of a man disregarded by society is not only a gritty character study but also a broader cautionary tale.”