Christopher Nolan Made Warner Bros. Change the Joker Ending

The Dark Knight director cut out a Heath Ledger-like Joker smile in the Joker movie.

By Cameron Bonomolo

Warning: This article contains Joker: Folie à Deux spoilers. You wanna know how Joaquin Phoenix's Joker almost got these scars? 2019's Joker, the gritty origin story directed and co-written by Todd Phillips, ends with Arthur Fleck (Phoenix) smearing a bloody smile across his face after emerging from the wreckage of a crashed police car. Swaying to the music in his mind as a mob of people wearing Joker makeup and clown masks set fire to Gotham City, Arthur becomes the Joker, according to the final shooting script dated December 2018.

But the Joker script (subtitled "an origin") nearly ended differently: with Phoenix's Joker using a piece of glass from the wreck to carve a Glasgow smile into his face so that he's always smiling, to borrow a phrase from Heath Ledger's Joker in 2008's The Dark Knight. That similarity is why director Christopher Nolan reportedly "killed that idea," according to The Hollywood Reporter, as the filmmaker believed that "only his Joker should carve his face."

In the Joker: Folie à Deux ending, a fellow Arkham inmate (Connor Storrie) stabs Arthur to death for abandoning his Joker persona during his televised trial. The inmate then laughs and, using that bloodied knife, slices his face into the shape of a smile, leading some confused moviegoers to mistakenly believe that the inmate is Ledger's Joker. But with Nolan severing ties with Warner Bros. over the studio's decision to make its entire 17-film slate available on the nascent HBO Max streaming service amid the pandemic in 2021 — a move that the Tenet director publicly and unapologetically criticized — there was no opposition to the carved smile in Joker 2 (which suggests that Arthur was never the Joker, but instead inspired the man who would eventually become Batman's arch-nemesis).

Here's how it's written in the Joker script following Nolan's mandate that cut out Arthur's carved face:

EXT. SQUAD CAR (CRASHED), STREET – NIGHT
FROM ABOVE, JOKER LAID OUT ON THE HOOD, arms spread, his hands uncuffed, a crowd has started to form around the wreckage, checking out his broken body--
ANGLE ON JOKER, A CROOKED SMILE PLASTERED ON HIS FACE, laughing, coughing up blood. The crowd steps back in surprise. Joker stumbles to his feet, standing up on the hood of the car--
Looks out at the city burning all around him… the crowd at his feet stunned that's he's alive… And over it all, Joker HEARS A STUDIO AUDIENCE APPLAUDING…
He raises a hands above his head, does a little dance move and the CROWD GOES CRAZY--
CLOSE ON JOKER, tears in his eyes from all the pain and suffering, still he keeps smiling as he wipes his bloody hand from one cheek across his mouth to his other cheek, smearing a wide blood-soaked smile across his face so they can all see how f*cking happy he is--
He is the Joker.

Joker: Folie à Deux is now playing only in theaters.

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