

Some authors, like Grant Morrison and Scott Snyder, excelled at this more than others. He became a larger metaphor for Batman’s ongoing war on crime. His appearance in the comics had to mean something. The Dark Knight made the Joker an event-level character, no longer able to simply run amok with the rest of Batman’s rogues. The actor’s tragic death before the film’s release.Nolan’s grounded approach to the character and insistence on keeping his origin mysterious.It wasn’t until Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight (2008) that the Joker exploded back into the zeitgeist thanks to a combination of elements:

The Joker’s popularity never subsided, but he was at least kept in rotation with Batman’s various other rogues, disappearing for a while only to back with a new scheme. Joker by Greg Capullo and Scott Snyder DC Comics And even though Nicholson’s character never appeared again - despite rumors that circulated throughout the 90s and early 2000s - Joel Schumacher’s Batman Forever (1995) turned both The Riddler (Jim Carrey) and Two-Face (Tommy Lee Jones) into pale imitations of the Clown Prince of Crime in an attempt to recapture the magic of Burton’s film. It took a combination of Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns (1986), Alan Moore and Brian Bolland’s Batman: The Killing Joke (1988), and Burton’s Batman to broaden the character’s appeal outside of regular comic book readers.Īfter Batman, we were blessed with the all-time great depiction of the Joker, voiced by Mark Hamill in Batman: The Animated Series. In the 1960s Batman series, it was Burgess Meredith’s Penguin who stole the spotlight, rather than Cesar Romero’s Joker. Interestingly enough, Joker was not always Batman’s most popular onscreen villain. There was everything from Bat-symbol shaped tortilla chips to the underrated Prince album.īut alongside Batmania came Jokermania, something a bit more difficult to chart in terms of sales figures.
NEW JOKER ACTOR 2021 MOVIE
When it comes to Batman ’89, most fans remember the so-called “Batmania” that swept the nation, leading to one of the biggest movie tie-in product rollouts at the time. “Have you ever danced with the devil in the pale moonlight?” Warner Bros.
