Todd Phillips says Phoenix’s Joker won’t crossover with Pattinson’s Batman

Last Updated on August 2, 2021

Todd Phillips' JOKER has been receiving some major buzz lately, especially after taking the top prize at the Venice Film Festival where it debuted, and there has been plenty of awards chatter surrounding Joaquin Phoenix's performance. At the end of the day, the film is a part of the DC Universe, which naturally brings up the possibility of Phoenix's character bumping into other DC characters at some point in the future, including Robert Pattinson's Batman.

During an interview with Variety last week, Robert Pattinson let slip an unspecified comment about Joaquin Phoenix's Joker which he was asked to retract. "Oh shit," Pattinson said. "I definitely should not say that. I’m so used to pretty art-house movies, where you can watch the movie three times and still not know what it’s about." This off-the-cuff comment got people wondering whether Joaquin Phoenix's Joker and Robert Pattinson's Batman might crossover, but Todd Phillips gave Variety a firm response to the question of the pair sharing the screen.

No, definitely not.

That's pretty definite; in fact, Todd Phillips said that he doesn't see JOKER "connecting to anything in the future. This is just a movie." That doesn't mean that a sequel is out of the question, as Todd Phillips has said that if they had the story, he'd absolutely work with Phoenix again. As far as THE BATMAN goes, the Matt Reeves film hasn't started production yet, but Robert Pattinson recently reflected on what it was like to step into the Bat-suit for the first time. "I put it on. I remember saying to Matt, ‘It does feel quite transformative!’ He was like, ‘I would hope it does! You’re literally in the Batsuit.’ You do feel very powerful immediately. And it’s pretty astonishing, something that is incredibly difficult to get into, so the ritual of getting into it is pretty humiliating," Pattinson said. "You’ve got five people trying to shove you into something. Once you’ve got it on, it’s like, ‘Yeah, I feel strong, I feel tough, even though I had to have someone squeezing my butt cheeks into the legs.'"

JOKER is set for an October 4, 2019 release, so be sure to check out a review of the film from our own Paul Shirey.