The new animated movie Aztec Batman: Clash of Empires comes with plenty of intriguing changes and additions to the usual lore, but its take on the Joker is particularly ingenious. Clash of Empires eschews Bruce Wayne and Gotham City altogether, instead reframing the story of Batman as an Aztec warrior seeking vengeance on Spanish conquistadors for attacking his city and murdering his father. Raymond Cruz plays Yoka, this world’s version of the Joker, who starts off as a high-ranking Aztec priest. Cruz and some of his colleagues spoke to ScreenRant bout the unique role at San Diego Comic-Con this weekend, ahead of the movie’s premiere on September 18th on HBO Max.
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“He doesn’t start off as the Joker,” Cruz explained. “He starts off under certain circumstances [that] influence, mentally [and] emotionally, where he ends up. And [living] within the Aztec rituals — the things that they believed in, like the sacrifice — all of this painted his mental picture.”
Cruz pointed out that in this story, Yoka is a fitting foil for Batman because they both start out as members of the Aztec priestly class, and their origin stories both start with the arrival of the conquistadors. He felt that it dovetailed nicely with the real history of Spanish colonialism.
“There’s a lot of tragedy in the Aztec story with the invasion of the Spanish Empire,” he said. “When they came in and decided they wanted to steal the gold and ravage the kingdom, all of that lends itself to tragedy. [We] take the character from [being] an enriched person–he was a high priest and advisor to Montezuma–and have him fall from grace and have to deal with that.”
Horacio García Rojas plays this movie’s Batman, Yohualli Coatl, who has a privileged upbringing among Aztec nobility until the conquistadors’ arrival. Hernán Cortés (Álvaro Morte) himself murders Batmans’ father before turning into this movie’s version of Two-Face. Writer-director Juan Meza-Leon said that these three identities weren’t just grafted onto historical characters at random — they were chosen with great care to tell the story at hand.
“This is the story of these two great human characters, human beings that go through a tragedy,” he said. “Each one makes a decision, either ‘I’m going to do whatever it is that I can within my power so that nobody suffers,’ or, ‘I’m going to do whatever it is in my power so that everybody suffers like me.’”
Aztec Batman: Clash of Empires is a co-production by Warner Bros. Animation and the Mexican animation company Ánima Estudios. It will get a theatrical release in Mexico, but here in the U.S. it will go straight to streaming on HBO Max on September 18th.
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