Last week, Robert Pattinson awkwardly dropped an ambiguous remark while speaking to Variety before The Batman star asked to retract his words. The subject in question involved the upcoming Joker, starring Joaquin Phoenix, with Pattinson offering a “mundane comment” before fretting over potential spoilers. This, naturally, led folks to speculate on whether Pattinson was riffing about a future crossover. The timeline did seem sketchy (but not entirely impossible) to have Phoenix’s 1980s incarnation of the supervillain somehow come face-to-face with Pattinson’s somewhat youthful version of Bruce Wayne (after Bruce Cullen plays Thomas Wayne in Joker). Fans do love a good theory, but Joker director Todd Phillips has now stepped in to shut speculation down.
While speaking to Variety from TIFF stated — in no uncertain terms — that Phoenix and Pattinson would not meet onscreen as their respective Warner Bros. characters (even though they both sit outside the DCEU, which makes things convenient with a little CGI). After crushing some hopes and dreams, Phillips did leave the door open for yet another actor to pick up the Joker in the future:
“No, definitely not,” he told Variety when asked if the pair would appear in a future film together. Although that doesn’t mean Joker will be the last film to feature the DC super villain.
“Oddly, in the states, comic books are our Shakespeare it seems, and you can do many many versions of Hamlet, Phillips said. “There will be many more jokers, I’m sure, in the future.”
Phillips’ Joker, the gritty origin story that sees Arthur Fleck come into his supervillainy, recently nabbed the prestigious Golden Lion award at the Venice Film Festival and will premiere in the U.S. on October 4. As for The Batman, Robert Pattinson won’t don the cowl to begin shooting until early 2020. With that wait in mind, Pattinson must be thrilled that Phillips has freed him from the public perception of accidentally spoiling something. However, this will only cause people to start wondering who might play some other incarnation of the Joker onscreen with Pattinson. And somewhere, someone will stir the pot and suggest Timothée Chalamet.
(Via Variety)
