The recent trailer for Cruella gave us our first look at Emma Stone as the eponymous future Dalmatian kidnapper, and garnered so many comparisons to Joker that the DC film quickly began trending on Twitter. Now, a new video has swapped out the audio of the former with that of the latter, and the result is eerily seamless.
The clip is the work of comedian and filmmaker Matthew Highton, who was also responsible for that hybrid of Super Mario Bros and The Shining that you might have seen a few weeks ago. He clarified that the only alteration he made was to swap the audio, and didn’t further edit the footage to better fit the new track, which as he succinctly put, “probably tells you more about trailer construction than anything else.”
Check it out below:
Turns out if you overlay the sound from the Joker trailer onto the Cruella one it fits so well you get a prequel film about Joker's mother. pic.twitter.com/C70lHoHQvd
— Matthew Highton (@MattHighton) February 18, 2021
With Arthur Fleck’s mother being such a key aspect of Joker, hearing the failed comedian talk while images of a working class young woman play out in front of you allow the two to mesh together in your mind, which along with the trailer’s grim tone makes it straightforward to imagine them taking place in the same world.
The comparisons to Joker also come from a conceptual level, with both movies telling a backstory where a canonical origin was previously lacking in an attempt to humanize a villain intentionally created to be utterly irredeemable, in the process arguably rendering them utterly purposeless. In this regard, it’s probably better compared to Maleficent, which did the same for the Sleeping Beauty’s draconic sorceress, the success of which kicked off the growing trend for such tales.
While it’s highly unlikely that Cruella will follow Joker with an R-rating (it is a Disney film, after all), it certainly looks to be a lot darker than the average offering from the House of Mouse, and its story of desperation pushed into villainy will be more than a little familiar to many.
