Is the joke on them?
DC/Warner Bros. counting on a lot of Joker fans
Lumbering film franchises not named Marvel keep making Kevin Feige look ever more like a genius.
This week, it’s DC’s cinematic universe and Disney/Lucasfilm’s Star Wars that, unintentionally through their missteps, bolster the impression that Feige is playing 3D chess while they’re playing Day- Glo checkers. According to reports this week in Hollywood trade publications, Warner Bros. has two different Joker films in development, apparently starring different actors, Jared Leto and Joaquin Phoenix, creating the impression of desperate overkill. Contrast that with Marvel. Feige, as head of Marvel Studios, has a decade-long winning streak. And he should continue that success with next month’s Ant-Man and the Wasp, which need only perform solidly after the monster box office this year of Marvel’s Black Panther and Avengers: Infinity War — a combined worldwide gross of more than $3.3 billion (all figures U.S.). One gift that Feige and his fellow Marvel leaders especially have a knack for is choosing the right projects.
Which brings us to the worlds of the Dark Lord and the Dark Knight.
From the first announcement, a “young Han Solo” story was a movie that few Star Wars fans had asked for. As fans and critics point to a range of pet reasons why Solo tanked, the fact remains: The Young Han spinoff has grossed only $267 million worldwide and stands to take in only half, at best, of what Disney’s other standalone Star Wars movie, 2016’s Rogue One ($1.06 billion), did.
As such outlets as Screen Rant reported, Solo co-screenwriter Jonathan Kasdan was uncertain about doing the movie. Kasdan the Younger is quoted in the companion book The Art of Solo: A Star Wars Story as saying: “I was ambivalent about doing it with him (father Lawrence Kasdan), because I was skeptical there was a good movie in the story of Han’s youth. I don’t tend to like prequels because there’s little to no suspense about whether the hero will survive.”
Studios also must be wary about trotting out actors to play characters closely linked to iconic performances by previous actors. But just as Lucasfilm believed that fans would warm to Alden Ehrenreich as Han Solo, Warner Bros./DC seems to believe that moviegoers want more of the Joker — and want more of Jared Leto playing the same Batman villain that Heath Ledger won a posthumous Oscar for portraying.
We first saw Leto’s Clown Prince of Crime in Suicide Squad — the 2016 mess of a team-up movie that got little love from filmgoers beyond Margot Robbie’s engaging performance as Harley Quinn. Now, as Variety is reporting, WB/DC is in early development on a standalone Joker film starring Leto, who would also be an executive producer.
Was any loud contingent of fans really asking for this? The Variety report is all the more confusing because last fall, Warner Bros. announced it had green-lighted a Joker origin movie, which starring Joaquin Phoenix — part of a separate line of origin stories existing outside of the DC cinematic universe, which is itself a mess except for Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman franchise. The optics surrounding this latest Joker news aren’t great, because it only increases the perception that Warner Bros. is in a muddle after the poor reception to last year’s Justice League.
It’s not clear who at WB/DC has a clear vision for how to build out its cinematic worlds. Is there no sure-handed top traffic cop who can bring order to all the announced and rumoured projects swirling around — a couple too many involving overused villains?
At Warner Bros., is there a single Kevin Feige to be found?