Comic-Book Movie Preview - Joker

DC is laying down a couple of wild cards and Marvel’s entering an all-new phase. Here’s the lowdown on every upcoming comicbook movie that matters, plus the biggest superhero names hitting the small screen.

- Jamie Graham

In Joker, director Todd Phillips and star Joaquin Phoenix give us an origin story so grounded and disturbing, it’s positively thrilling. Total Film claws under the grease-painted skin of the darkest comic-book movie yet.

Joaquin Phoenix is attempting to explain how he discovered his version of the Joker, which will undoubtedly be the deepest, darkest and most distressing version to yet (dis)grace out screens. He ums and ahs, slouched back in his chair at The London Hotel in West Hollywood with his trainers planted on the coffee table before him and his arms crossed over the chest of his Support the Animal Liberation Front hoodie. A lifelong vegan, Phoenix always finds it tricky to chew on the meaty question of what it is that he does so well for a living, and where, exactly, inspiration intersects with intuition.

The 44-year-old actor squirms and runs a thick-fingered hand through his longish, swept-back, grey-streaked hair, then muses on losing 53lb, on studying interpretive dance, and on uncorking an alarming laugh that aches with sorrow and slips in and out of a dry retch as it bubbles up from way down inside. “You always sound so pretentious when you talk about this, right?” he offers with an apologetic smile.

For the three times (soon to be four, surely) Oscar-nominated leading man who stakes a (why-so-) serious claim to the title of Actor Of His Generation, much of his startling performance was unearthed between signing on the dotted in February 2018 and starting the shoot in September. It was during this period that he all but starved himself to lose the weight, trading the hard-packed muscle-coated-in-a-layer-of-flab torso he exhibited in