The Toronto Film Festival has just given us a big surprise with ‘The People’s Joker’, as he has decided to withdraw this parody of the DC character after a legal claim from Warner. Obviously, this controversial decision has not gone unnoticed and now there is a question of to what extent it can lead to ‘The People’s Joker’ ending up in oblivion.
VeraDrewco-writer, director and protagonist of the film, has not been slow to refer to the possible problem of the rights of the film – eye, that in addition to Joker Harley Quinn and Batman also appear– in an interview granted to Collider in which he has commented the following:
I think this film can be distributed 100%. It is fully protected by fair use and copyright law. Like a parody law. The only thing that makes it weird in both categories is that no one has ever taken characters and IPs and customized them like this. So I think that’s what really makes it seem so much more dangerous than I really think it is. I mean, I get it, look, I put an “illegal comic book movie” on the poster, but that was just to get their asses in the seats.
There is literally no reason for anyone to worry, I think, about the legal repercussions of this. Without getting into it, we’ve gone to great lengths to make sure we could do this. I probably wouldn’t have spent two years of my life making a really illegal Joker movie.
‘The People’s Joker’ tells the story of an aspiring clown who is dealing with her gender identity. This Joker then founds an illegal comedy group with another would-be comedian after comedy has been criminalized, and his group attracts more rogues. In the film experimental cut shots and the narrative are included queer it’s very important.
We’ll see how all this turns out, but it seems clear that at Warner they don’t even want to hear about the moviea logical move, but even more so that ‘Joker 2’ is officially underway.
In Espinof: