When Fox put the first X-Men movie together, producers looked at the pages of the comics and worried about whether moviegoers would be put off by the silly clowns dancing around on the pages even as they salivated at the potential profits those silly clowns promisedVenir de Tragamonedas Gratis Online. They took inspiration from The Matrix, according to Kevin Feige, and instead put the team in black leather–and then wrote in a joke about yellow spandex just to remind us what a bunch of dummies we are for liking the source material, comic books.
Nearly a quarter of a century later, Marvel Studios has changed the conversation, giving us great-looking, faithful reproductions of characters like Wolverine, Ant-Man, Captain Marvel, and Spider-Man among many others. They made $30 billion doing it. So why are there still so many productions out there that seem to be terrified of acknowledging their source material?
DC recently debuted the movie Joker: Folie à Deux, and we’re a few episodes into HBO’s The Penguin–two dramatic adaptations of well-known DC villains that promise an in-depth look at these villains as if they were real people. Both seem to be begging us every minute to forget that they’re based on comics.
The Penguin, as a series and a spin-off of The Batman, gets the chance to stick out the most. This could be a great way to bring Gotham to life in ways that don’t fit into a movie (even a three-hour-long one). Instead, they seem to be making a Gotham-themed Sopranos tribute–a show about a balding, aging mobster in New Jersey and his attempts to manage his family and grow his power.
Before the release of The Batman, I wrote that I was worried that The Batman would hew too closely to the blueprint set by Christopher Nolan. Having watched the movie seven times by my count, The Batman is my favorite portrayal of a young Bruce Wayne. He’s the right mix of inexperienced and overzealous, while also being deeply committed and highly resourceful. It’s my favorite Gotham, too, straddling the line between being too real to fit the story and too strange to be believable. There are a ton of stand-out performances in there, too, including Robert Pattinson, Colin Ferrell, Jeffrey Wright, and Zoë Kravitz. I love the movie.
But over and over, The Penguin reminds me of that fear. The movie seemed to be afraid to acknowledge any part of Batman that wasn’t pulled or adapted from The Long Halloween. They even changed Penguin’s given name to keep him from seeming too silly for adults, who are only interested in art and not comics, to take seriously.
The first Joker movie isn’t so different from The Penguin. Like The Penguin, it’s a story with some strong performances and is ostensibly based in the Batman universe, but desperately avoids anything related to Batman or anything that might feel like a comic book. Further, the same way that The Penguin feels like it’s pulling too heavily from The Sopranos to be its own thing, Joker is Todd Phillips’ riff on Martin Scorsese’s 1982 film The King of Comedy, going so far as to include that movie’s star, Robert DeNiro, and to pay homage to Scorsese’s directorial style. The sequel, meanwhile, has its own issues.
The Penguin refuses to mention Batman even tangentially–there are no Bat Signals in the sky, no mentions of the vigilante who was literally thrust into the spotlight just weeks ago (in the show’s timeline) in broadcasts, and no concerns voiced by the countless mobsters in the show. This latest episode debuted a first look at the source of the Falcone’s new drug, Bliss. There were hopes among fans that, since it was forced onto Sofia Falcone in Arkham Asylum, it might be related to Scarecrow’s fear toxin. The route they chose is interesting in its own right, but it seems like a move specifically designed to avoid being a Batman reference.
When directors latch onto Batman, they seem to pull from one of a very small number of sources. Batman: Year One and The Long Halloween are the two biggest examples of this, with both trying to imagine Batman in a somewhat more plausible light. Meanwhile, they ignore the clear guides set down by Batman: The Animated Series.
B:TAS, throughout its run, gave us uniquely human views of its villains. The episode “Heart of Ice” reimagined Mr. Freeze as the protagonist of his own tragedy tale and won a Daytime Emmy for it. Another episode, “Birds of a Feather,” followed Penguin’s continued efforts to be recognized as a member of high society and let us watch as a wealthy couple manipulated him and broke his heart. The series had similarly powerful and thoughtful episodes about Clayface, Two-Face, and Poison Ivy. These characters were allowed to be weird comic-book characters, artfully rendered, and without having their humanity taken away. Even the Joker got the literary treatment in episodes like Joker’s Wild and Joker’s Favor, which both find interesting ways to investigate a character who is, generally speaking, treated more like a force of nature than he is like a human.
It’s possible to treat Batman seriously without taking all of the fun out of the character. The Penguin (and to a lesser degree, The Batman) and the Joker movies want us to believe otherwise–that we have to look past the comic book to figure out what’s interesting about these characters. But it’s just not true.
