In the last few days, there’s been no shortage of Joker-centric news headlines popping up around the web, most of them dedicated to Joaquin Phoenix and his first appearance in makeup for the upcoming, Todd Phillips-directed Joker origin story. But even while that Joker film moves forward, DC and Warner Bros. are still working on that other Joker movie—the one starring a returning Jared Leto as the version of The Joker first seen in Suicide Squad, flanked by Margot Robbie’s version of Harley Quinn. And boy, does the writers’ description of that movie sound odd.
According to screenwriters Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, best known for writing Bad Santa, the feel of their Joker movie is part raunchy comedy, ‘ala Bad Santa, and part heartstring-tugging drama, as they also wrote in several episodes of NBC’s This Is Us. If it doesn’t really seem to you like those two things fit neatly together, you’re not alone.
“It was sort of like, we wrote Bad Santa a couple of years ago, and it was that sensibility mixed with our This Is Us sensibility,” said Ficarra in an interview with Metro. “We kind of meshed them together. We were doing a relationship movie but with the sensibility of a Bad Santa, f***ed up, mentally deranged people. It was a lot of fun.”