Exclusive: Two-Face Movie In Development From Joker Director
According to our trusted and proven sources, the Jokerverse is going to be expanding with a gritty new Two-Face movie.
This article is more than 2 years old
Todd Phillip’s Joker was a very unexpected hit in 2019. While few could have predicted the filmmaker behind The Hangover and Due Date would one day win the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival with a Martin Scorsese-homage comic book adaptation, fewer still could have predicted it would make over a billion dollars at the box office. But a success like that only encourages more risks, and our trusted and proven sources have told us Todd Phillips is developing a Two-Face movie to expand the Jokerverse.
According to our sources, not only will a Two-Face movie presumably take the same grimy, theoretically-realistic approach as Joker did, but it will be set in the same world. Given the portrayal of Gotham City in Phillips’ movie as a hopelessly bureaucratic, crime-ridden hellhole, it makes sense for there to be some idealistic do-gooder District Attorney to try to help things only to be ground under the gears of misery. Cue Harvey Dent, presumably.
Two-Face has had only two prior significant movie appearances, which leaves plenty of space for a new interpretation of the character. In 1995’s Joel Schumacher-directed Batman Forever, Tommy Lee Jones played a colorful, manic version of the dualism-obsessed villain, albeit one that refused to sanction any buffoonery. Then in 2008, Aaron Eckhart played a somewhat more traditional version of the character in The Dark Knight, focusing more on his life as Harvey Dent before his facial scarring and descent into villainy.
Joker’s version of the iconic villain was a failed comic and general target of all the ills of the world named Arthur Fleck. While there has never been a truly definitive, explicit version of the Joker’s origin in mainstream DC Comics (Alan Moore’s The Killing Joke coming closest), Todd Phillips movie seemed to be portraying some other variant of the character. It stands to reason that a Two-Face movie might take the same tactic and create essentially a new character that uses the imagery and legend of the original.
Of course, Two-Face in any movie or comic has a much more defined origin than the Joker ever has. In almost all versions of the character, he begins as an idealistic (though not completely unwilling to bend or break the law as needed) District Attorney named Harvey Dent who leads a campaign against organized crime in Gotham City. Through variously depicted means, he is horrifically scarred across one side of his face (or body, in some portrayals), which drives him to insanity.
In recent years, Two-Face has increasingly been portrayed as a former ally of Batman turned to darkness. However, in Todd Phillips’ Joker, Bruce Wayne is a child and failing a large time jump, a Two-Face movie might not feature a Batman at all. But given that there is currently a terribly-titled Joker 2 in development, we could see anything happening in this new Todd Phillips take on the DCEU. We can only hope that someday we might get gritty, miserable, 1970s-cinema style takes on Killer Croc and the Calendar Man in the Jokerverse.
