‘Joker’ Director Todd Phillips Crushes Dreams of Seeing Joaquin Phoenix Opposite Robert Pattinson’s Batman

It would be nice to see Robert Pattinson’s Batman and Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker have at each other’s throats, but Joker director Todd Phillips doesn’t think his version of the Clown Prince of Crime is up for a future movie together with the newly-minted Batman actor.

The news comes after Joker won the coveted Golden Lion for Best Film at the Venice International Film Festival over the weekend. Film pundits see the movie as a strong Academy Award contender, a first for DC and a comic book film to garner such pre-Oscar hype since Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight in 2012.

In an interview with Variety, Phillips was quick to shut down hopes of seeing Joker and Batsy going toe-to-toe in a future movie. “No, definitely not. Oddly, in the states, comic books are our Shakespeare it seems, and you can do many many versions of Hamlet,” Phillips said. “There will be many more jokers, I’m sure, in the future.”

While this might be a bit disappointing to fans, Phillips isn’t exactly in the wrong to stress that Joker is its own movie. It’s reported that Matt Reeves plans to highlight Batman’s detective skills in his upcoming movie, with rumors circulating that Pattinson will be squaring off against a plethora of Batman rogues—Penguin, Riddler, Mad Hatter, Catwoman, Firefly, and Two-Face. It’s safe to assume that Phillips’ artful take on the character doesn’t jive well with the vision that Reeves wants to execute for his solo Batman film.

Meanwhile, Joker’s Zazie Beetz also addressed criticisms surrounding the movie saying it was glorifying the comic book villain’s homicidal tendencies. “I think that it’s really an empathy toward isolation and kind of what is our duty as a society I suppose to address people who slip through the cracks in a way,” Beetz explained. “Of course, there’s a lot of culture of that right now. But I don’t know if it’s as much — is it empathy for that or is it an observation on personalities who struggle.”

No matter how much yays and nays the film gets, it only strengthens the fact that Joker is bound to become another comic book movie tentpole.

Joker hits theaters October 4, 2019.