We should feel sorry for Jared Leto. His Joker never had a chance
The actor’s Suicide Squad character had been sidelined long before Todd Phillips’s film starring Joaquin Phoenix as Batman’s arch enemy was greenlit
Would it really be surprising that Jared Leto had tried to stop Todd Phillips’s Joker from being made? This is what a piece in the Hollywood Reporter suggests, though the claim is said to have been denied by a representative for Leto and by Warner Bros.
It might seem ridiculous to fans that a film that has taken more than $700m (£541m) at the global box office and (at least initially) wowed critics could have been swatted from the schedules at the whim of an actor who barely appeared as the clown prince of Gotham in 2016’s Suicide Squad. And yet that would be to forget the circumstances in which Leto found himself cast as Batman’s nemesis five years ago, and was subsequently thrown to the slavering hounds by Warner Bros.