There are a little over five weeks to go until Zack Snyder’s Justice League arrives on HBO Max and the hype train is rolling along nicely, with the filmmaker dropping a new clip yesterday to confirm that the final trailer is coming on Sunday. And based on the latest images to make their way online, it looks like the next promo could show us Jared Leto’s Joker in action.
When Snyder teased the actor’s new appearance with a blurry and out of focus image, it felt as though he’d be keeping the Clown Prince of Crime under wraps until the all-new Justice League premiered. However, that hasn’t turned out to be the case, and a pair of new images show how the freshly-minted Golden Globe nominee will look in the hotly anticipated four-hour epic when it debuts next month.
The first thing that jumps out is that the Joker doesn’t have any of the tattoos that proved to be so divisive among the purists when he debuted in Suicide Squad, and knowing how insane Batman’s archenemy is, he might have removed them himself. His outfit makes it clear that he’s spent a lot of time locked up in an asylum, too, with some eerie vibes seeping out of every pore, and Snyder even offered an ominous tease of his role in the plot.
“The cool thing about the scene is that it’s Joker talking directly to Batman about Batman. 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.”
We know that the Joker’s part in Justice League isn’t going to be substantial after Snyder admitted that he’d only shot four or five minutes of new footage, with the Jester of Genocide expected to appear in the extended Knightmare sequences. But based on these stark monochromatic images alone, Leto is already set to win over many of the doubters who dismissed his initial take on the character.
