Suicide Squad wasn’t what you’d call a hit with critics, but the 2016 superhero flick made almost $750m worldwide – about $90m more than Justice League.
All of this might explain why, according to sources at Variety, Warner Bros is reportedly thinking about devoting a whole movie to Jared Leto’s incarnation of the Joker.
Further details are currently sketchy, partly because the project is clearly in its early stages. Only a few months ago, we heard reports that Joaquin Phoenix was set to play the Joker himself, with director Todd Phillips in charge of that production. The rumours were that Phillips’ film would delve into the early history of the Clown Prince of Crime.
It could be that the Phillips-Phoenix movie is still in the works, since Warner had previously said that it has plans to relax the continuity between its DC Extended Universe. We already know, for example, that Leto is set to reprise his role in the sequel to Suicide Squad, set to begin filming in 2019.
Could Warner simply be hedging its bets with two separate Joker projects? Appropriately, for a pair of projects about a trickster criminal, solid facts are currently elusive.
More on this as we get it.