Joker Director Says Arthur Fleck ‘Would Be in Awe of the Alpha Male That is Batman’

While Bruce Wayne is not yet Batman in the Gotham City inhabited by Arthur Fleck, Joker and Joker: Folie à Deux director and co-writer Todd Phillips thinks this Joker would admire the Dark Knight Detective.

“I think Arthur would be in awe of the alpha male that is Batman. I really do. I think Arthur would look up and appreciate it,” Phillips told IGN last week during a one-on-one interview. “I think he’d be in awe of that.”

Phillips explained why his films’ deeply troubled outsider protagonist would, unlike the Clown Prince of Crime of the comics and other iterations, be awestruck by the costumed vigilante.

“I think Arthur always had a fascination with men at ease, and he is not a man at ease. [Robert De Niro’s] Murray Franklin in the first movie was a man at ease,” Phillips said. “He probably saw the guys he worked with as men at ease, and that was the one thing that Arthur could never be was a man at ease.”

While Phillips recently confirmed that there won’t be a Joker 3, he previously pondered the Caped Crusader’s place someday in the Gotham City he created for Joker.

“It’d be interesting to see somebody do a Batman movie in this vein that follows that guy 10 years later or whatever,” Phillips told IGN in 2019. “If he’s 12 or 11 there and okay 15 years later becoming Batman in that world. Yeah, I think that’d be really interesting.”

Should someone eventually make such a Batman film in the world of the Joker movies, it certainly won’t be connected to the Robert Pattinson saga.

For more DC coverage, read our Joker: Folie à Deux review and check out what The Penguin cast had to tell us about why Batman doesn’t appear in the HBO spin-off series.