Zack Snyder’s moping Batman, from B v. S: Dawn of Justice
With all due respect to Clark Kent, the big money for DC is not Superman. It’s Batman. It has been Batman for decades. The Caped Crusader, Bruce Wayne, has been reimagined on screen in recent years more times than I care to count. In TV shows, animated and live-action; in movies, animated and live-action. Big-budget film series of Batman have lived, died, been reborn, ad nauseum.
So I was a little surprised when I finally got around to the casting of Suicide Squad, the upcoming film in the DC/Warner Bros. shared universe. Even more surprised when I heard so little in the wake of the news.
DC/WB has been crafting the outlines of their “shared universe” for a few years now. It began with Man of Steel, in 2013, and continues next year with Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice, which will introduce the next actor to play the Caped Crusader, Ben Affleck. Affleck is a question mark of his own.
But also out in 2016 will be Suicide Squad, DC’s team of misfit antiheroes working for/against the US government.
Leto, in Fight Club
One member of the Suicide Squad cast that deems mentioning: Jared Leto, as the Joker, himself. The Joker is THE iconic supervillain of the big screen. No one even comes close (second is General Zod? Loki? I don’t even know, the gap is so huge).
There’s a reason that the Joker is the big bad in the two best on-screen adaptations of Batman. The Joker was played to perfection by Jack Nicholson in Tim Burton’s Batman, and then, somehow, played even better by Heath Ledger in Christohper Nolan’s The Dark Knight. I don’t envy Leto stepping into the role (which he reportedly plans to base on Ledger’s performance, news that disappoints me, Jared. Make it your own).
For the record, I like Jared Leto just fine. He’s in a lot of movies I enjoy and performs admirably in most of them. But I cannot help but wonder if the same execs at DC/WB were in the room for these two conversations:
1) Who should play Batman in this mountain of franchises we are building?
2) What is the Suicide Squad again? Who needs to be cast for that movie, now?
Because those two conversations are going to cross paths in perhaps the most important moment in the future of the DC Shared Universe: when Batman once more faces off against The Joker.
So start the countdown kids, after hundreds of millions of dollars are spent and multiple franchises are spawned, for that lucky day no one ever knew to anticipate: when Ben Affleck and Jared Leto do battle.
