Warner BrosWhy so serious? Todd Phillips’ Joker has been rated 15 by the BBFC, for ‘strong bloody violence’.
The film, starring Joaquin Phoenix as the titular jester, has been showered in praise following recent film festival premieres: Empire’s editor-in-chief Terri White called it ‘bold, devastating and utterly beautiful’.
As a character, he’s the ultimate prankster and maniac; a self-serving vehicle of chaos. As such, it’s unsurprising to see the upcoming film, which has been touted to be taking a gritty, grounded approach, given a 15 rating in the UK.
BBFCCheck out the trailer below:
Joker looks to be a dark, twisted odyssey through the origin of the iconic Batman foe – it’s been rated R in the US for ‘strong bloody violence, disturbing behavior, language, and brief sexual images’ – for the MPAA-uninitiated, that’s the second highest rating.
The film’s synopsis reads:
Joker centers around the iconic arch-nemesis and is an original, standalone story not seen before on the big screen.
The exploration of Arthur Fleck (Phoenix), a man disregarded by society, is not only a gritty character study, but also a broader cautionary tale.
The UK’s full BBFC rating states: ‘strong bloody violence, language’.
Check out the first trailer below:
The Joker has attracted the 15 rating before with Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman featuring Jack Nicholson and 2016’s Suicide Squad with Jared Leto starring as the Clown Prince of Crime.
The prospect of R-rated comicbook movies has been in frequent conversation ever since the huge success of 2016’s Deadpool – a sweary, cartoonishly violent superhero flick that pulled in $783 million at the box office. It became the second highest-grossing R-rated film of all time behind Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ.
Cameron FrewHowever, Warner Bros’ own R-rated horror box office triumph It (just over $700m) wasn’t even enough to convince the studio to allow Phillips to make the edgy drama he had in mind.
From the script’s completion, Phillips – who directed The Hangover series and War Dogs – revealed it was a ‘year-long process just to get the new people on board with this vision’.
In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Phillips said:
There were emails about: ‘You realize we sell Joker pajamas at Target.’
There were a zillion hurdles, and you just sort of had to navigate those one at a time… at the time I would curse them in my head every day. But then I have to put it in perspective and go, ‘They’re pretty bold that they did this.’
Warner BrosFrom the trailers, it’s easy to suss out Phillips’ reference points: for example, there’s major Martin Scorsese nods to Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy.
Phillips explained:
The movies that I grew up loving, these character studies from the 70s, you couldn’t get those movies made in this climate. I said to myself, ‘What if you did a movie in that vein, but made it about [comic book] characters?’
Let’s put a smile on that face: Joker hits UK cinemas on October 4.
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After graduating from Glasgow Caledonian University with an NCTJ and BCTJ-accredited Multimedia Journalism degree, Cameron ventured into the world of print journalism at The National, while also working as a freelance film journalist on the side, becoming an accredited Rotten Tomatoes critic in the process. He’s now left his Scottish homelands and took up residence at UNILAD as a journalist.