Fanboys Anonymous

Welcome to another edition of Predicting the Plot wherein I try my best to guess how an upcoming movie is going to play out from start to finish with as many details as I can possibly give, based entirely on the previews and lead-up material I've seen.

I might be dead wrong. I may get some things right. In any way, I encourage you to give your predictions just the same in the comments below.

For this edition, I'll be tackling my fan theory of what Todd Phillips is bringing us with the upcoming movie Joker starring Joaquin Phoenix as the iconic Clown Prince of Crime...maybe.


It's important to note that I haven't seen The King of Comedy, which I feel this will take some inspiration from. I have seen Taxi Driver, though, many many moons ago.

So let's start with the synopsis we've been given:

Failed comedian Arthur Fleck encounters violent thugs while wandering the streets of Gotham City dressed as a clown. Disregarded by society, Fleck begins a slow dissent into madness as he transforms into the criminal mastermind known as the Joker.

The movie starts with Arthur as a boy. His mom Penny (Frances Conroy) and dad are weird, at best. They could be the argumentative type and his dad could be abusive. Or, perhaps they even skip that and show that he and his mom are alone because his dad left them. Remember this idea and keep in mind the concept of a stepfather.

Penny has ticks or is psychotic or schizophrenic or something that we can attribute to her genetics passing on a predisposition to Arthur that he's going to have to grow up with, and we can already tell that as a boy, he has his social problems and such. This could be when he first manifests his Pseudobulbar affect (ie, how he laughs uncontrollably at random times when stressed).

Arthur is fixated on comedians. That calms him down. One of them is his idol, Murray Franklin (Robert DeNiro).

Arthur wants to be a stand-up comic, but he sucks at it. He tries to go on stage, but gets heckled and possibly even abused in some fashion. We know at some point, he's dressed as a clown, spinning a sign and gets picked on and beaten up, so this seems to be a run of the mill type thing. He's a loser, and that's going to weigh on him.

Over the years, Penny got so bad that she had to be transferred to Arkham Asylum, and/or Arthur has to receive check-ups. I don't see a doctor on the cast list, so I don't think Arthur is seeing a physician for a bunch of times in the movie, but we do see "Arkham State Hospital Clerk" played by Brian Tyree Henry. He's a name, so that must mean he's in at least a handful of scenes and is probably the go-to person to talk to when Arthur visits his mom.

Somewhere along the way, Arthur starts flirting with Sophie Dumond (Zazie Beetz) even if she's not flirting back. Whether it's mutual and he screws it up or it's one-sided and she eventually has to tell him she's not interested, the point is that his love life goals will be shattered toward the breaking point.

Meanwhile, Thomas Wayne (Brett Cullen)—who, in this version, instead of being a humanitarian and younger, is an older Donald Trump type playboy asshole politician—is running for office and is all the talk. Arthur gets the idea in his mind that Wayne is his father. He even meets up with Young Bruce Wayne (Dante Pereira-Olson) and that's where we have that scene of the two at the gate of Wayne Manor. Arthur thinks Bruce is his younger brother.

He isn't. Thomas Wayne isn't his father. His mother just made that up to either give him a false sense of value, or she's so deluded that she believed it herself, but it isn't true. None of this is true. Arthur is just a failure and a mistake.

So he snaps. He becomes The Joker and gets on television and kills everyone. This incites revolution and everyone maybe even kills Thomas Wayne, if Arthur hasn't already done that. The end.

If there's anything after that, if we're lucky, it would be really cool for them to show someone in a Batman costume and Joker being arrested or something. Then, there's some sort of tease that none of this was real and he tosses out the line about how if he'd like to have a past, he'd like for it to be multiple choice, and the whole thing is basically bullshit because The Joker doesn't have an origin story and it wouldn't make any sense for him to be 30+ years older than Batman, nor for Bruce to have a father who is 63 around the time Thomas and Martha are killed as they're normally around 30-40 range...50 max.

Either the whole movie is meaningless, or it ends with him becoming The Joker in a metaphorical sense and not obviously actually the character that fights Batman, as there isn't a Batman, and it's just a film about the interesting villain without having to frame it in the context of what makes Joker who he is, similar to how if someone wrote a movie about Edward Nygma being into riddles and becoming a criminal that the GCPD try to stop, but can't, and there's no Batman. Or, if there was a movie about Doomsday destroying the world without a Superman (ie, any monster movie that has ever existed that ends in gloom).