The upcoming Joker movie, which takes place in the 1980s and tells the story of how a failed comedian became the most feared criminal in Gotham City has just added a key piece of Batman history. Alec Baldwin will play Dr. Thomas Wayne, the father of the Dark Knight himself, Bruce Wayne.
Baldwin joins a cast that includes Joaquin Phoenix as the title character, Robert De Niro, and Zazie Beetz.
Baldwin is a perfect choice for Bruce Wayne’s father, in part because at one point he would have made a perfect Batman, himself. Instead, he played Batman’s literary/spiritual father as the lead of the (underrated) 1994 adaptation of The Shadow. Imagine an alternate reality where the defining Batman movie of the 1980s was directed by Joe Dante, starred Baldwin as Bruce Wayne, and John Lithgow as the Joker. We’d be living in a very different world. Okay, maybe not, but it would have been cool.
This does ring some alarm bells, though. THR has word that apparently the version of Thomas Wayne we’re going to meet here is “a cheesy and tanned businessman who is more in the mould of a 1980s Donald Trump.” Hopefully they have this wrong, because not only is this joke already not funny (Baldwin’s SNL Trump impression has been stale for over a year), it flies in the face of Batman mythology that shows the elder Wayne as a pillar of the community and an inspiration to young Bruce.
What’s more, one of the many ways in which the Batman prequel du jour, the Gotham TV series, repeatedly goes off the rails is its overbearing insistence on jamming in tons of winking references to the ghost of Batman future at every possible moment. While Dr. Thomas Wayne is a prominent Gotham City citizen, and it would make sense for him to show up in some capacity in a movie like Joker, the character hopefully won’t be used to illustrate that the man-who-would-be-Joker already had a long standing hatred of the Wayne family because the good doctor stiffed him out of a cab ride or something. Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman movie was the first (and only) iteration of the legend to cast a pre-Joker gunman as the murderer of the Waynes, and hopefully that isn’t making a return here.
Joker is scheduled for release on October 4th 2019.