Director Todd Phillips recently revealed he had a loose plan for what he called DC Black—a spin-off DC Films series that would feature grittier, darker anti-hero movies made on a modest budget, much like his “Joker” film. The pitch he made never got picked up by Warner Bros. because of the regime change at the studio. Still, the original brass was very gung-ho about his idea, and he even had filmmakers in mind to tackle different superheroes and villains.
“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,” he explained.
READ MORE: The 100 Most Anticipated Films Of 2020
The idea, he said, was to hire other filmmakers to apply that approach and aesthetic to other DC Comics characters. And now, in a recent interview with Variety, Phillips appears to be pitching some of those very ideas?
“It’s a beautiful Gotham. What I would like to see someone tackle is what Batman looks like from that Gotham,” Phillips said at the Palm Springs International Film Festival.
Don’t expect Phillips to make that film himself, though. “I’m not saying I’m going to do that. What was interesting to me about the inclusion of Batman in our movie was, ‘What kind of Batman does that Gotham make?’ That’s all I meant by that,” he explained.
READ MORE: The Best Horror Movies Of The Decade [the 2010s]
It’s a brief quote, sure, but it sounds an awful lot like the idea he suggested in that recent interview, a kind of “here’s what we’d love to see, we should get X to make it.”
READ MORE: The 100 Best Films Of The Decade
While Phillips is still mulling over ideas for a potential “Joker” sequel and has discussed the idea with co-writer Scott Silver and star Joaquin Phoenix, it doesn’t sound like they’ve gotten much further than “Last night, was the first time [Phoenix and I] hung out for a while, and we weren’t talking about [a sequel],” he said.
So, we’re no closer to a “Joker” sequel than we were a few months ago, but considering how successful the film was—$1 billion-plus on a $60 million budget; the most profitable superhero movie ever—you can bet everyone involved is still turning it over in their mind. And given the Oscar nominations are coming soon and “Joker” could find itself with a Best Picture nomination, that could give Phillips extra leverage to revisit DC Black or make whatever he wants to make next.
Main photo courtesy of set photography Niko Tavernise, seen in the Instagram slide below.
https://www.instagram.com/p/B3vMQgsJZZi/