More than a few moviegoers coming out of Phillips’ Joker 2 have reached the conclusion that, finally, we KNOW how Ledger’s Joker got his scars: he copycat-ed a more famous Joker (Phoenix’s Fleck) after killing him, stealing his throne and thunder.
We imagine Christopher Nolan would be mightily ticked off about this emerging assumption/fan theory. After all, it just came out that he stopped the first Joker movie from more or less having the same misleading ending.
In a surprisingly quick bit of backstage gossip coming out in the trades following Joker: Folie à Deux’s grisly opening weekend, unnamed sources let it be known to The Hollywood Reporter that the original Joker movie was supposed to conclude with Phoenix’s Joker carving the Glasgow smile onto his face in front of an adoring and cheering crowd, presumably during the scene where he made a bloody smile in the final cut of the movie.
“But The Dark Knight filmmaker Christopher Nolan killed that idea,” THR reported, “believing that only his Joker (Heath Ledger) should carve his face. But Nolan is no longer at the studio, and thus there was no resistance to the idea this time around.”
Nolan probably had reason to be protective of the iconography he invented, and Ledger gave startling life to, nearly 20 years ago. After all, we need to stress that the unnamed Arkham inmate played by Connor Storrie is not a version of Ledger’s Joker. Ledger’s Joker is either in his late 20s or early 30s in 2008, which is more than 25 years after the events of Joker 2. Furthermore, we saw exactly how Thomas and Martha Wayne died in Nolan’s Batman trilogy, and they were of a nobler sort than the cynical elitists and demagogues introduced to viewers in Phillips’ 2019 Joker.
And yet, understandably, some casual viewers who may not remember every intricate detail or scene from 19-year-old movies like Batman Begins can come away with the false impression that Phillips’ Joker flicks are de facto prequels to Nolan’s trilogy, and that Phillips’ Joker is a “grounded,” artful contextualization of Ledger’s iconic performance.