The Batman Makes Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker 2 Even More Unnecessary
Warning! SPOILERS for The Batman.
Barry Keoghan's surprise character in The Batman makes the potential sequel movie Joker 2 feel even more unnecessary than it already seems. As a complete reboot of the Batman mythos, The Batman provides a brand-new look at Gotham without retreading old ground. Director Matt Reeves skips the murder of Thomas and Martha Wayne, Bruce Wayne's first battles, and Batman's first encounter with the Joker in order to tell an original story involving Gotham's corrupt individuals and the vigilantes who seek to take them down. Nevertheless, these offscreen elements are likely to influence the story of Robert Pattinson's Bruce Wayne in the future, even more so considering that The Batman introduced Barry Keoghan's Joker as a villain who's ready to wreak havoc in future sequels.
While the already established DCEU keeps expanding with new releases, such as The Flash, Black Adam, and Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, The Batman is building a self-contained franchise filled with grounded narratives. However, the Justice League universe and The Batman franchise aren't Warner Bros.' only two continuities. Todd Phillips' Joker also exists as a separate story. This poses the question: should all active live-action Jokers continue to appear in future movies?
Like The Batman, Joker is a grounded and self-contained story — so much so that it leaves virtually no loose plot threads for a future movie to resolve. Besides another opportunity to witness Joaquin Phoenix chew the scenery as Arthur Fleck, there really is no need for a sequel to Todd Phillips Joker. The Batman only reinforces this, as it plants the seeds for an extensive franchise where Robert Pattinson's Batman can interact with his own Joker. Although both universes are similarly gritty and grounded, some key details need to be incompatible for each story to work as well as it does. For instance, the role Thomas Wayne had in Arthur Fleck's birth in Joker and the mysterious death of the Waynes in The Batman are both crucial to their respective stories and impossible to reconcile with each other.
Both Joker and The Batman are movies that care very little about interconnectivity. However, The Batman just happens to set the foundations for future spinoffs and sequels that explore the evolution of the characters introduced in the first movie. In fact, The Batman makes it very clear that Batman, Catwoman, James Gordon, the Penguin, and even the now incarcerated Riddler have a long road ahead of them in terms of character development. Batman, for example, has just learned that Gotham needs a hero who seeks justice instead of vengeance. Hence, the moment he truly becomes a fully-formed Batman is yet to come. On the other hand, Arthur Fleck's climactic transformation into the Joker, signaled by his blood smile at the end of Joker, is the moment his whole story built up to. While it certainly would be fun to see how Joaquin Phoenix's Joker embraced his villainous persona afterward, his story could end right there and it wouldn't feel incomplete.
Fans will undoubtedly expect an eventual confrontation between Robert Pattinson's Batman and his iconic archenemy. Instead of introducing yet another Batman in Joker's universe, and instead of forcing The Batman and Joker to coexist, it makes more sense to start Barry Keoghan's Joker story from scratch. All things considered, it seems like a wide variety of separate continuities will continue to be a valuable asset for the DCEU.