Filmmaker Todd Phillips has a pretty great story about how he came up with “The Joker” pitch to Warner Bros which he told on the most recent episode of Michael Moore’s podcast, Rumble With Michael Moore. As he tells it, it’s 2016 and he’s standing outside the premiere of his movie “War Dogs”— says he can’t stand being inside the theater of his movies on premiere day, so he’s standing outside and he’s smoking. The director knew his movie was out of step with the culture and had a sense that the movie likely wasn’t going to be a big hit.
READ MORE: The 100 Most Anticipated Films Of 2020
Or as Phillips puts it, he knew “’War Dogs’ wasn’t going to set the world on fire,” he told Moore.
He’s smoking, loitering outside when he looks up and sees a billboard for a superhero movie (not said, but very likely “Suicide Squad” given the era), and there’s a kind of eureka moment: his movie “War Dogs” is just not where the culture is and where the business is headed. To survive, it would be smart to make a superhero movie. There’s one problem. He hates them and thinks they’re juvenile and for kids. And as he stands there, looking up, feeling somewhat despondent, the idea forms for anti-heroes and taking I.P. and hustling it through the system.
READ MORE: The Best Horror Movies Of The Decade [2010s]
Right there and then, he gets a phone call from Warner Bros. It’s then-production WB president Greg Silverman, apologizing for not being able to attend the “War Dogs” premiere because school was starting soon and he was on vacation with his kids. And Phillips immediately uses that opportunity to pitch him his “Joker” idea which Silverman immediately loved, something Phillips knew to be true because he started receiving texts a few minutes later from different WB execs dying to hear more about Phillips’ “Joker” pitch which Silverman obviously excitedly started telling everyone about despite being on vacation.
READ MORE: The 100 Best Films Of The Decade
But in this impromptu pitch, Phillips revealed to Moore than he actually pitched “DC Black”— the mooted labeled that was rumored early on, never came to fruition and Phillips recently confirmed the existence of. He explained his pitch in detail which was acting as a kind of figurehead and getting different filmmakers he liked to tackle different grounded, gritty villain movies.
“It wasn’t one idea,” Phillips said clarifying about the notion of just pitching a “Joker” movie. “What I pitched them was, ‘We should start a label. We should start a label where we get great directors—Joker could be the first on—but let’s do a label called DC Black, where we make stripped-down, no CGI, no spandex quote-unquote comic book movies, but we do deep-dive character studies,’ and I literally said, ‘get so-and-so [director] to do this character’—I don’t want to name them because I never told these directors [my proposal]—’get so-so to do that character,’ and we start with Joker and we start a whole label.”
“Instead of trying to be Marvel? Do something Marvel can’t do, which is an R-Rated, stripped-down—Disney can’t make those movies—so instead of trying to emulate them, go over here,” he explained, remembering his pitch to Silverman. “By the way, you can still do your normal DC movies and have two bites of the apple.”
Phillips tells the pitch story twice during the 1-hour podcast, the aforementioned story outside “War Dogs” earlier on and then later towards, the end, the more specific side of the DC Black pitch and one thing that’s suggested throughout the podcast where he talks about the difficulties of getting “Joker” made and the hoops he had to jump through to convince WB and DC Films to make the movie is how regime change at the studio changed everything. It seems clear that the old WB of 2016, Silverman, Kevin Tsujihara, loved the DC Black idea, the WB regime that took over, not so much.
“So that was the thing they got excited about,” Phillips explained about DC Black. “This other [thing], this whole label, [but] that ended up going away when the regime change happened and they started saying—and I understand why they did it— ‘Now we’re gonna complicate all these different worlds. If we feel like doing a movie like this, we’ll do it, but it doesn’t need its own label, and blah blah blah. But [back in 2016] when [one of the studio execs] came out of the theater [of the ‘War Dogs’ premiere] and [said to me], ‘wow, I wanna talk to you, ride with me,’ it was about this idea of the label, not just the idea of one movie, does that make sense? That’s where it all came from.”
As for where that goes? Well, Phillips has a billion-dollar-plus film on his hand, the most profitable superhero movie of all time, he’s currently discussing ideas for a Joker sequel—though he’s unsure what happens there—and it would not be a surprise, given the hit of “Joker” if the DC Black idea comes back again, even if they don’t use the name itself. It’s a fascinating podcast and you should give it a listen below.
Top photo by “Joker” set photographer Niko Tavernise.