… There is.
We have known for some time that Zack Snyder is risen Smörgåsbord from to Justice League cut would somehow find time in its gigantic runtime to add a little bit of Jared Leto’s Joker for good measure, but now, we have our first look at him in … well, not so much, because he’s sitting there looking miserable, which seems to be the extent of what we saw about Snyder’s disease Justice League so far.
But! He is quite different from the Joker, we saw Leto play David Ayer Suicide squad.
Revealed in social media today, the Joker was not originally in Snyder’s plans to Justice League before the director tragically left the film after a death in the family. When Warner Bros. had a chance to really do a new version of Justice League, however – and realizing that any original plans he would have for future DC films besides Justice League are not the direction that the DC movieverse is going now—Snyder saw the chance to come in and incorporate some of his own ideas for the Dark Knight and Crime Clown Prince in the new version.
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Joker appears in a scene from which we eventually saw a version in Joss Whedon’s version of the film: a nightmare vision of the catastrophe that Bruce Wayne of Ben Affleck would experience from a land devastated by Darkseid.
“The cool thing about the scene is that the Joker is talking directly to Batman about Batman,” said Snyder Vanity Fair. “It’s the Joker analyzing Batman about who he is and what he is. That’s what I also felt the fans deserved from DC Universe. That is, Jared Leto Joker and Ben Affleck Batman, they never really met. It didn’t seem cool to me that we had made it all the way through this incarnation of Batman and Joker without seeing them coming together. “
Which is, essentially, why this “new” Joker looks so different from the short-haired, tattooed Joker we know in Suicide squad, and more like … a strange amalgam between Joaquin Phoenix Joker, Jared Leto and The Crow? Snyder did not clarify why the Joker is losing his literal body of work but he added that in addition to the medical apron he’s wearing, the Joker’s costume includes a bulletproof vest full of badges from the cops he killed, so do what you want.
Zack Snyder’s Justice League launches on HBO Max March 18.
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