If there’s one character in the DC universe that needs to be put to rest for a few years, it’s the Joker. Warner Bros. would be smart to take a long break from any more live-action adaptations of this character and focus on elevating lesser-known villains instead. Fans have seen a lot of the Joker in the past decade or so. In fact, the Joker has always been a very popular villain in the Batman lore, the kind of bad guy that shows up adaptation after adaptation. This means viewers have had to replace one version of the character with another and then another so many times. At this point, can anyone even name a definitive Joker? Every fan might have their favorite, but the truth of the matter is – they’ve just seen too many.
Cesar Romero first brought the character to the big screen, complete with a mustache beneath the white makeup. His Joker might have seen a bit over the top at times, but it was the perfect representation of the character from the Golden/Silver Age of comics. Back then the character was more about mischief than chaos, and no one would have dared to think of him as Batman’s nemesis. He was just an over-the-top on purpose, fun kind of villain.
Jack Nicholson’s performance would change this image of the Joker and establish a much showier, unabashedly cruel version, something newer incantations would come to rely heavily on, as the mythos around the character grew. It’s hard to imagine Cesar Romero’s version having any relevance today, much less studios accepting an interpretation like that one, and that probably ties back to what Nicholson did with his Joker, and the way Mark Hammill’s voice work for his animated version of the Joker in Batman: The Animated Series and other properties also leaned heavily into this sort of comic-book Joker persona.
Hamill’s Joker isn’t a killer the way Nicholson’s is, the series was aimed at children, after all, but there’s a malice behind every action, every word, that has carried over into the more recent Jokers. But it’s Heath Ledger’s performance in 2008’s The Dark Knight that has probably become the standard for the character – despite the fact that Joaquin Phoenix also won an Oscar in 2020 for playing the same character in Joker. Ledger’s Joker is cruel, but cruelty isn’t the point. The point is that there is no point. Life is meaningless. There’s no right or wrong, not really. It’s all perception, and that depends on the person, and the situation.
The Dark Knight is trying to tell a story about the ambiguous morals of the world, which explains why Ledger’s performance resonated. It also explains why, despite the fact that there’s one more live-action Joker in between the two performances that won an Oscar, and that Joker – Jared Leto’s – was also played by an Oscar winner, his performance is the most forgettable of the last three fans have seen. Leto’s Joker is all nihilism and stereotypes, the same thing Ledger’s and later the Joaquin Phoenix version, studiously avoids. The movie in which the character appears is also a weaker movie, which never helps when trying to establish an iconic character.
Phoenix’s version of the Joker, on the other hand, is less comic-book Joker and more real-life villain. That story isn’t about his cruelties, his rivalry with Batman, or what the character would end up becoming. it's more about the reasons why he became that. It’s the origin story taken to the extreme, and despite the obvious comparisons to other performances, a substantial amount of the audience responded to that positively. However, parallels can be drawn between three performances of the same character in the last 12 years, and that two of the men who played the Joker won an Oscar for the same role, points to the fact that viewers probably don’t need another Joker anytime soon.
Even The Suicide Squad is moving ahead without the Joker – yet keeping Harley Quinn, a decision that points to an awareness of the need to introduce new characters into the DCEU universe, instead of relying on a different interpretation of the same one. The fact that so many of the actors who embodied the Joker role recently gave outstanding performances doesn’t really help make this character more appealing, if anything, it makes it even less so. Every new Joker will carry the weight of expectations from all previous performances, and that’s an added burden no movie wants to carry.
There is a great deal of more obscure villains DC can focus on going forward, and build up to greater relevance, and they’d be smart to turn their focus to doing just that. At some point it might be smart to bring the Joker back, but those days are probably a decade or two away. There are enough performances to re-watch if fans need a Joker fix, and a lot to be gained by establishing other villains that can carry their own weight in the DCEU.