Joaquin Phoenix on the Joker’s Future: “We’ll Just Have to Wait and See”

The newest DC Comics movie is a huge change of pace for the franchise so far. While they’ve created popular films like The Dark Knight Trilogy and Constantine that have been darker, their latest focus has seemingly been more light-hearted superhero fare. That all changes next month with the release of Joker, the R-rated Todd Phillips movie in which Joaquin Phoenix plays Batman‘s most iconic foe, offering an unflinching take on the violent descent of a struggling comedian. But will we see him become the Clown Prince of Crime that many fans are familiar with?

ComicBook’s Jim Viscardi caught up with Joaquin Phoenix ahead of the premiere of Joker and asked if there were future plans for the character, and the actor could only be coy in his response.

“I don’t know,” Phoenix said with a sly smile, “We’ll just have to wait and see.”

There have been questions about the future of the character, and while director Todd Phillips makes it seem like this is a self-contained story, he’s also revealed that he has ideas for future stories with the character.

“Well, I don’t think we’re gonna make a second one. That’s just not in our plans,” Phillips said in an interview with Jake Hamilton. “But for fun, have me and Joaquin bounced around ideas? We were doing it when we were shooting, because that’s what you do sometimes.”

Some fans are speculating that this character could eventually come into collision with Robert Pattinson’s take on Batman after Matt Reeves finishes his first film. But Phillips also put that fire out before it could ignite, saying that this is a completely different take on the character outside of the mainstream DC Comics universe.

The director previously explained why he wanted to tell a story outside of the constraints of the franchise in order to do the character the justice that he deserves.

“I love the complexity of Joker and felt his origin would be worth exploring on film, since nobody’s done that and even in the canon he has no formalized beginning,” explained Phillips. “So, [co-writer] Scott Silver and I wrote a version of a complex and complicated character, and how he might evolve…and then devolve. That is what interested me—not a Joker story, but the story of becoming Joker.”

Joker is currently set to premiere in theaters on October 4th.