Jared Leto’s Joker returns for Zack Snyder’s Justice League in new images

“Why so serious?”

“It can’t rain all the time!”

First things first. They got rid of that stupid Damaged tattoo so at least that is something. Now just scars remain.

These new images (via Vanity Fair) of Jared Leto as The Joker who will be appearing in JZack Snyder’s Justice League. We last saw Lete’s Joker in the Suicide Squad movie when he was covered in tattoos and had short hair. Now it appears they’ve thrown in a bit of Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker and a dash of Brandon Lee’s The Crow. The character does look a lot better this way, but has the indifference created from the Suicide Squad movie carried over to this incarnation of the Clown Prince of Crime? To be honest I’d like to see a full wackadoodle Joker giving out poison fish and doing madcap crimes for a bit.

The Joker was not originally in Snyder’s Justice League movie, but given the chance to return to the project he has thrown him back into the mix. Joker appears in a scene that we eventually saw a version of in Joss Whedon’s version of the movie: a nightmarish vision of catastrophe to come experienced by Ben Affleck’s Bruce Wayne of an Earth devastated by Darkseid.

“The cool thing about the scene is that it’s Joker talking directly to Batman about Batman,” Snyder told Vanity Fair. “It’s Joker analyzing Batman about who he is and what he is. That’s the thing I also felt like fans deserved from the DC Universe. That is to say, the Jared Leto Joker and the Ben Affleck Batman, they never really got together. It seemed uncool to me that we would make it all the way through this incarnation of Batman and Joker without seeing them come together.”

“The scene explains why Bruce had the Joker card taped to his gun that you see in Batman v Superman. I’d always wanted to explore the death of Robin, and if there ever was going to be a next movie, which, of course, there probably won’t be, I wanted to do a thing where, in flashbacks, we learn how Robin died, how Joker killed him and burned down Wayne Manor, and that whole thing that happened between him and Bruce.”

Part of me wants to sit Snyder down with a load of Justice League comics and show him Martian Manhunter eating Oreos and Batman punching out Guy Gardner and all the “Bwah ha ha” moments of comedy and hope that is a big part of the comics.

The four-hour Justice League movie is out in cinemas and HBO Max on 18th March. I will be watching it but I have no idea if I will enjoy it or not.

What do you think of this version of the Joker and are you looking forward to Snyder’s cut of the Justice League?

Photos by Zack Snyder