The 92nd Academy Awards kick off tonight and Joker leads the pack with an impressive 11 nominations, including Best Actor, Best Picture, Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay. While Sam Mendes’ 1917 might pip it to the post on Best Picture and Best Director, Joaquin Phoenix is the favorite to walk away with Best Actor and I’d wager the film will end the night with a few other statues as well. But, it’s already picked up one rather interesting award ahead of that, as Joker has been named the most dangerous movie of the year.
The award isn’t quite what you’d expect, though. First assumptions might be that this is a repeat of the misguided handwringing that accompanied the film’s release. People who hadn’t actually seen the movie claimed that it could inspire a wave of Joker-influenced mass shootings or that it was some kind of incel power fantasy. But no, this particular award comes from internet security company Kaspersky and their latest press release explains that the popularity of Joker is causing malware and virus manufacturers to try and hide their dodgy goods inside fake copies of the film.
We’ve all seen those suspicious YouTube comments that read things like ‘!!CL!CK HERE!! 2 WATCH FULL J0KER MOVIE ONLINE!!” If you foolish enough to click through, you’d find a page designed to forcibly inject a lot of harmful spyware into your computer. And according to their report, Kaspersky has seen 300+ files created trying to bait unwary users. Incidentally, the second-most dangerous film is 1917 and the third is The Irishman.
While I doubt that Warner Bros. will be touting this particular gong, it’s just another example of how crazily popular Joker has become. Most expected it to do well, but I don’t think anybody dared to predict it’d gross more than a billion dollars and walk into the 2020 Oscars as the most-nominated movie. And by tonight, we’ll know just how many of those Oscars it managed to snag.
