The Joker movie had an ending which left audiences with a lot to talk about, wondering how much of the movie was real or fake, and flat out shocked by what the actions they saw carried out by Joaquin Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck. As it turns out, according to Kevin Smith, there was almost a wild, more shocking ending to the Todd Phillips-directed thrill ride based on the DC Comics villain. Smith didn’t know if he was supposed to share it, so he kept his source a secret to protect their job, but he went into detail about how the movie almost ended and it would have had Smith “outraged as a Batman fan!”
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Smith heavily prefaced his reveal of the alternate ending with an uncertainty to its validity, including the fact that it had him thinking, “What the f—?’ very heavily to himself as he couldn’t believe what the film considered doing.
“Originally, the ending in the hospital was different,” Smith said on his Fatman Beyond show. “He’s in the hospital and he laughs, chuckles, and he says, ‘I was just thinkin’ of something funny. What was supposed to happen was you flashed back to the death or Thomas and Martha Wayne and it was him killing Thomas and Martha Wayne and the boy was screaming and crying and he turned to walk away and he turned back, shrugged, and shot the kid. Credits.”
The full conversation can be seen in Smith’s YouTube video above, with the Joker bits starting at the 16:35 mark.
“What the f—, man!” Smith asked himself, pointing out something important: “This world has no Batman!”
Of course, the Joker movie did not ultimately have a Batman in it at all despite portraying the key moment from Bruce Wayne’s origin story which lead to him becoming Gotham’s Caped Crusader. It is entirely possible that the studio elected not to feature the violent killing of a kid in an already violent and controversial movie but there also remains the idea that a sequel was being preserved which might pit the Joker character against a grown up Bruce Wayne as Batman. For now, Warner Bros. promises there are no official plans for a sequel to Joker.
Would you have liked to see Joker break the rules of DC Comics canon more than ever and kill young Bruce Wayne to prevent Batman from ever beginning in that world? Share your thoughts in the comment section or send them my way on Instagram and Twitter!
Joker is available now on digital downloads and on blu-ray on January 7.
