Comic book movie fans and naysayers alike are still arguing over Ethan Hawke saying they’re not so hot, but the genre still trucks along all the same. To wit: According to The Hollywood Reporter, the forthcoming big Joker stand-alone movie — the one starring Joaquin Phoenix that promises to be more of a darkly comic character study than a typical superhero film — just cast Alec Baldwin as Batman’s dad.
The actor will be playing Thomas Wayne, father of Bruce Wayne. To get a taste at how un-traditional this Joker spin-off will be, Father Batman won’t be the noble do-gooder unfairly taken down in his prime as in most iterations of the Caped Crusader story. He’ll be a cheesy, tanned, ’80s style businessman. That’s right: He’ll be closer to You Know Who, the very man Baldwin regularly plays on Saturday Night Live. So maybe it won’t be much of a stretch.
Baldwin will be joining a wild cast that already includes Robert De Niro, Marc Maron and Zazie Beetz, who stole parts of Deadpool 2. The film — currently titled simply Joker — will be directed and co-written by Todd Phillips, of all three Hangover films as well as Old School, War Dogs and, back in the day, the reliably shocking Hated: GG Allin and the Murder Junkies. In fact, that Phillips once made a documentary about the explosive, self-destructive punk rocker makes him the perfect director for a renegade comic book movie about the Joker.
