Editorials
Dear WB/DC: How to Learn the Right Lessons from ‘Joker’ and Avoid the Wrong Ones
It’s undeniable at this point: Joker is an enormous success. As I write this, its second weekend at the box office is on track to bring in ~$60m, signifying a less than 40% drop from its opening weekend. That is inarguably astounding. People are clearly motivated to check out this movie. And it’s unavoidable that Warner Bros. – and more specifically, their DC Comics film branch – are going to try and figure out how to replicate that achievement.
Now, this is not going to be a critical opinion piece when looking at Joker. You can hear my feelings towards the movie on my GenreVision episode. Instead, I want to examine what WB and DC should take away from Joker when thinking about how best to utilize their comic book stable moving forward. Movie studios rarely learn the right things from their successes, and I think Joker is a great opportunity to showcase what works and what doesn’t with these kinds of projects.
DON’T Make a Bunch of Villain Movies
When Joker was gaining good buzz and increased interest, I saw a lot of reactions clamoring for more solo movies focused on villains. This is the kind of shortsighted desire that is destined to fail.
Joker made sense as a solo movie for a number of reasons. The most important (and financially sound) reason being that the Joker is the most recognizable and influential villain in comic book history. As risky as Joker‘s approach to the material might have been, its subject character has been proven to be an enormous draw for audiences across the world. While there are plenty of other noteworthy villains – just in Batman’s rogues gallery alone – it’s highly unlikely that any of them have the kind of mass appeal to carry a singular film.
That’s not to say villains aren’t interesting from a narrative perspective. As someone who is intimately familiar with Batman stories in all forms of media, there are plenty of fantastic stories that can be told with a villain as the protagonist. But, to feel that Joker worked simply because it focused on a villain instead of a hero is missing the forest for a single tree. And if the DC film banner starts cranking out villain movies, it won’t help but feel like a crass, exploitative, and frankly uninspired maneuver after Joker.
Side note: I do think there is a good Catwoman movie to be made – she could certainly use some cinematic redemption – but that character has become so much less of a villain in modern interpretations that I don’t think she quite fits in with other potential villain movies.
DO Stray Away From the Shared Universe
When the cinematic marketplace is dominated by a single replicated experience, audiences will eventually begin to crave something new. This has happened time and time again over the years: the Western, the musical, the fantasy epic, etc.
For the last decade, superhero/comic book cinema has been overwhelmed by the Marvel Cinematic Universe and its particular brand of storytelling. This influence caused DC to try and replicate that model with… less than favorable results. Now, we’re beginning to see the DC canon start to embrace singular characters and franchises instead of attempting to create an overarching universal story.
And that is good. Let Marvel continue to do what they do best and let DC offer something different. Now, while the DC universe will continue to have tangential connections to other films, I think Joker proves that these connections alone aren’t what is going to drive people to the theater. Films like Birds of Prey and The Suicide Squad will somewhat be continuations of previous DC films, but the impetus to create some grand cinematic universe shouldn’t be what drives the DC stable. Compelling self-contained stories (whether that’s self-contained to a single film or a specific franchise) are something DC can excel at, and Joker has given them the kind of renewed confidence they should have in this regard.
DON’T Try to Go Gritty and Grim for Everything
A stripped-down, bleak take on Joker might not be what some people wanted, but it’s a direction that isn’t without merit in regards to the title character. Doing a downright horror film version of the Joker is something that you can argue makes sense.
However, that shouldn’t be the springboard for the entire DC canon to suddenly turn into a dark and brooding R-rated grimfest. This is my least concerned point regarding the fallout from Joker’s success since it’s pretty certain next year’s slate of films – Birds of Prey and Wonder Woman 1984 – won’t be gritty or anywhere near Joker’s specific take and tone.
Still, I don’t want WB thinking that this means Matt Reeves’ The Batman suddenly needs to copy what Joker was doing. The same goes for the rest of their properties. In fact, it would be invigorating to hear that WB was going to do another standalone one-off film but this time it was focused on Superman. And what would be really enticing would be if it was a bright, anachronistic, cheery, corny, and definitive take on the character that was aimed at an all-ages audience.
Finding what the correct tone is for each property is what seems to work for wide audiences, and it’s just the right direction to take when making these comic book properties into big tentpole events. While a grim and gritty version of Joker was the right call, that doesn’t mean it will be the right call for the rest of the DC films.
DO Let Directors Run With a Unique Vision
No matter how you fall in regards to your feelings on Joker, it’s very clear that it is a specific version from a particular creative voice. Jack Giroux of /Film wrote a great piece about how only Todd Phillips could have been the person to make Joker. It illuminates a really fascinating point about the modern-day landscape of comic book cinema.
Because the Marvel Cinematic Universe has to all line up as part of a greater world, it means that the movies can’t color too much outside the lines with their takes. That doesn’t mean they can’t produce good movies, but there is a reason why a common complaint about the MCU is their samey nature.
On the other hand, DC is often very good at allowing filmmakers to bring a unique style and perspective to their films. Even Zack Snyder’s movies are definitively Zack Snyder movies. The problem that arose for some viewers with that vision was that it felt incongruous to the characters and world that Snyder was playing with (see the previous section).
Allowing creatives to come onto these comic book films and create something that feels distinctly theirs has got to be appealing to filmmakers. That freedom to really play with the material and make it their own is something DC should really lean into. They may not always work, but they will always feel like standout pieces of comic book cinema.
DON’T Turn Everything Into a Prestige Picture
A lot of the fervor surrounding Joker has to do with its position as a prestige picture for the studio. Scuttlebutt about Joaquin Phoenix’s performance was already high, and winning the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival only made the film look more distinguished. Now, there are plenty of cries for Phoenix to be nominated for Best Actor for the Academy Awards.
That’s all fine and dandy. Awards conversations are often tiresome but it’s always nice to see genre fare getting recognized by the establishment. But, this shouldn’t mean that the DC comics characters should be mined for Oscar bait. The last thing I want to see is DC trying to figure out how best to manipulate their roster in order to garner some kind of high praise from the Academy.
Honestly, this is also something to talk about specifically with the character of the Joker. Thanks to big-screen portrayals by Jack Nicholson, Heath Ledger, Joaquin Phoenix, and even Jared Leto, the Clown Prince of Crime is being somewhat pigeon-holed into having to be a Big Deal any time the character shows up in a live-action format. It’d be great to get a supporting turn from someone playing the Joker and it not be touted as some big deal either in terms of performance or how the actor approached the role.
It’s great that Joker is probably getting some folks to watch a comic book movie that might not do so otherwise. If part of that reasoning is because of its critical acclaim, cool. But, I don’t really want to see an Oscar bait take on anyone else in the DC universe.
DO Embrace the Distinct Nature of Your Characters
Much like the section about allowing directors to bring sharp and original takes to their films, DC should also recognize what’s so special about their characters and play to those strengths. Part of the reason Wonder Woman, Aquaman, and Shazam! were successful is that they feel like truly representative versions of their characters and their worlds.
The same can be said for Joker. Whether that representation is something you like is up to you, but it’s clearly something that has resonated with audiences and captivated their curiosity. It seems like audiences respond to movies about comic book characters that feel like strong, well-defined versions of those characters.
Instead of trying to make all your characters fit under a tonal umbrella (see the Shared Universe section), let filmmakers find what fascinates them about a particular character and expand upon that idea so that they can shape a version of that character that feels fresh and interesting. If artists are allowed to zero in on the best (read: most compelling) elements of these characters and work outward from there, we’ll get more on-screen heroes and villains that have the chance to become the standards for a certain generation of fans.
Here’s what we know about Longlegs so far. It’s coming in July of 2024, it’s directed by Osgood Perkins (The Blackcoat’s Daughter), and it features Maika Monroe (It Follows) as an FBI agent who discovers a personal connection between her and a serial killer who has ties to the occult. We know that the serial killer is going to be played by none other than Nicolas Cage and that the marketing has been nothing short of cryptic excellence up to this point.
At the very least, we can assume NEON’s upcoming film is going to be a dark, horror-fueled hunt for a serial killer. With that in mind, let’s take a look at five disturbing serial killers-versus-law-enforcement stories to get us even more jacked up for Longlegs.
MEMORIES OF MURDER (2003)
This South Korean film directed by Oscar-winning director Bong Joon-ho (Parasite) is a wild ride. The film features a handful of cops who seem like total goofs investigating a serial killer who brutally murders women who are out and wearing red on rainy evenings. The cops are tired, unorganized, and border on stoner comedy levels of idiocy. The movie at first seems to have a strange level of forgiveness for these characters as they try to pin the murders on a mentally handicapped person at one point, beating him and trying to coerce him into a confession for crimes he didn’t commit. A serious cop from the big city comes down to help with the case and is able to instill order.
But still, the killer evades and provokes not only the police but an entire country as everyone becomes more unstable and paranoid with each grizzly murder and sex crime.
I’ve never seen a film with a stranger tone than Memories of Murder. A movie that deals with such serious issues but has such fallible, seemingly nonserious people at its core. As the film rolls on and more women are murdered, you realize that a lot of these faults come from men who are hopeless and desperate to catch a killer in a country that – much like in another great serial killer story, Citizen X – is doing more harm to their plight than good.
Major spoiler warning: What makes Memories of Murder somehow more haunting is that it’s loosely based on a true story. It is a story where the real-life killer hadn’t been caught at the time of the film’s release. It ends with our main character Detective Park (Song Kang-ho), now a salesman, looking hopelessly at the audience (or judgingly) as the credits roll. Over sixteen years later the killer, Lee Choon Jae, was found using DNA evidence. He was already serving a life sentence for another murder. Choon Jae even admitted to watching the film during his court case saying, “I just watched it as a movie, I had no feeling or emotion towards the movie.”
In the end, Memories of Murder is a must-see for fans of the subgenre. The film juggles an almost slapstick tone with that of a dark murder mystery and yet, in the end, works like a charm.
CURE (1997)
If you watched 2023’s Hypnotic and thought to yourself, “A killer who hypnotizes his victims to get them to do his bidding is a pretty cool idea. I only wish it were a better movie!” Boy, do I have great news for you.
In Cure (spoilers ahead), a detective (Koji Yakusho) and forensic psychologist (Tsuyoshi Ujiki) team up to find a serial killer who’s brutally marking their victims by cutting a large “X” into their throats and chests. Not just a little “X” mind you but a big, gross, flappy one.
At each crime scene, the murderer is there and is coherent and willing to cooperate. They can remember committing the crimes but can’t remember why. Each of these murders is creepy on a cellular level because we watch the killers act out these crimes with zero emotion. They feel different than your average movie murder. Colder….meaner.
What’s going on here is that a man named Mamiya (Masato Hagiwara) is walking around and somehow manipulating people’s minds using the flame of a lighter and a strange conversational cadence to hypnotize them and convince them to murder. The detectives eventually catch him but are unable to understand the scope of what’s happening before it’s too late.
If you thought dealing with a psychopathic murderer was hard, imagine dealing with one who could convince you to go home and murder your wife. Not only is Cure amazingly filmed and edited but it has more horror elements than your average serial killer film.
MANHUNTER (1986)
In the first-ever Hannibal Lecter story brought in front of the cameras, Detective Will Graham (William Petersen) finds his serial killers by stepping into their headspace. This is how he caught Hannibal Lecter (played here by Brian Cox), but not without paying a price. Graham became so obsessed with his cases that he ended up having a mental breakdown.
In Manhunter, Graham not only has to deal with Lecter playing psychological games with him from behind bars but a new serial killer in Francis Dolarhyde (in a legendary performance by Tom Noonan). One who likes to wear pantyhose on his head and murder entire families so that he can feel “seen” and “accepted” in their dead eyes. At one point Lecter even finds a way to gift Graham’s home address to the new killer via personal ads in a newspaper.
Michael Mann (Heat, Thief) directed a film that was far too stylish for its time but that fans and critics both would have loved today in the same way we appreciate movies like Nightcrawler or Drive. From the soundtrack to the visuals to the in-depth psychoanalysis of an insanely disturbed protagonist and the man trying to catch him. We watch Graham completely lose his shit and unravel as he takes us through the psyche of our killer. Which is as fascinating as it is fucked.
Manhunter is a classic case of a serial killer-versus-detective story where each side of the coin is tarnished in their own way when it’s all said and done. As Detective Park put it in Memories of Murder, “What kind of detective sleeps at night?”
INSOMNIA (2002)
Maybe it’s because of the foggy atmosphere. Maybe it’s because it’s the only film in Christopher Nolan’s filmography he didn’t write as well as direct. But for some reason, Insomnia always feels forgotten about whenever we give Nolan his flowers for whatever his latest cinematic achievement is.
Whatever the case, I know it’s no fault of the quality of the film, because Insomnia is a certified serial killer classic that adds several unique layers to the detective/killer dynamic. One way to create an extreme sense of unease with a movie villain is to cast someone you’d never expect in the role, which is exactly what Nolan did by casting the hilarious and sweet Robin Williams as a manipulative child murderer. He capped that off by casting Al Pacino as the embattled detective hunting him down.
This dynamic was fascinating as Williams was creepy and clever in the role. He was subdued in a way that was never boring but believable. On the other side of it, Al Pacino felt as if he’d walked straight off the set of 1995’s Heat and onto this one. A broken and imperfect man trying to stop a far worse one.
Aside from the stellar acting, Insomnia stands out because of its unique setting and plot. Both working against the detective. The investigation is taking place in a part of Alaska where the sun never goes down. This creates a beautiful, nightmare atmosphere where by the end of it, Pacino’s character is like a Freddy Krueger victim in the leadup to their eventual, exhausted death as he runs around town trying to catch a serial killer while dealing with the debilitating effects of insomnia. Meanwhile, he’s under an internal affairs investigation for planting evidence to catch another child killer and accidentally shoots his partner who he just found out is about to testify against him. The kicker here is that the killer knows what happened that fateful day and is using it to blackmail Pacino’s character into letting him get away with his own crimes.
If this is the kind of “what would you do?” intrigue we get with the story from Longlegs? We’ll be in for a treat. Hoo-ah.
FALLEN (1998)
Fallen may not be nearly as obscure as Memories of Murder or Cure. Hell, it boasts an all-star cast of Denzel Washington, John Goodman, Donald Sutherland, James Gandolfini, and Elias Koteas. But when you bring it up around anyone who has seen it, their ears perk up, and the word “underrated” usually follows. And when it comes to the occult tie-ins that Longlegs will allegedly have? Fallen may be the most appropriate film on this entire list.
In the movie, Detective Hobbs (Washington) catches vicious serial killer Edgar Reese (Koteas) who seems to place some sort of curse on him during Hobbs’ victory lap. After Reese is put to death via electric chair, dead bodies start popping up all over town with his M.O., eventually pointing towards Hobbs as the culprit. After all, Reese is dead. As Hobbs investigates he realizes that a fallen angel named Azazel is possessing human body after human body and using them to commit occult murders. It has its eyes fixated on him, his co-workers, and family members; wrecking their lives or flat-out murdering them one by one until the whole world is damned.
Mixing a demonic entity into a detective/serial killer story is fascinating because it puts our detective in the unsettling position of being the one who is hunted. How the hell do you stop a demon who can inhabit anyone they want with a mere touch?!
Fallen is a great mix of detective story and supernatural horror tale. Not only are we treated to Denzel Washington as the lead in a grim noir (complete with narration) as he uncovers this occult storyline, but we’re left with a pretty great “what would you do?” situation in a movie that isn’t afraid to take the story to some dark places. Especially when it comes to the way the film ends. It’s a great horror thriller in the same vein as Frailty but with a little more detective work mixed in.
Look for Longlegs in theaters on July 12, 2024.
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