Love That New ‘Joker’ Trailer

Early October is quickly becoming the time to release your idiosyncratic stand-alone comic book movies, with Joker being the latest to follow the trend started by last year's Venom. While Venom was dumber than dirt and ostensibly meant to kick off a franchise, this October's Joker looks more like the sort of one-off comic book movies that fans like myself have been hoping they'd make for years.

The brilliant thing about Joker is that it's not tied to any existing cinematic universe, so there are no established rules for the film. There doesn't have to be a Batman, Ben Affleck or otherwise, and there doesn't have to be an endless series of winks and nods to the fans while setting up characters and events that won't be paid off for three more movies, if ever. Not only that, but it stars one of our greatest living actors as one of pop culture's greatest creations. What about that isn't exciting to comic book nerds?

So yes, some people will stumble out of the theater this October lamenting the lack of a strong hero or the presence of any other recognizable faces or names from the comic books, but that's fine. Those people don't deserve nice things anyway, let them rot in their misery. The rest of us will be talking about how these kinds of movies should have been in production for years now.

Joker opens on October 4.