There is nothing wrong with an actor returning to a role that someone else has been cheerfully filling for a while, but it doesn’t always go well. Just ask Sean Connery, who picked up James Bond’s Walther PPK again in the sub-par Diamonds Are Forever despite George Lazenby having played the role in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service two years earlier.
And yet there is something iffy about this week’s news that Jared Leto will play the Joker once again in Zack Snyder’s reworked version of Justice League, which is being brought to the small screen by HBO Max after a fan campaign. Snyder had to step away from the 2017 superhero ensemble due to a death in the family. He was replaced by Joss Whedon, who rewrote most of the script, cut various storylines and tried to invest the po-faced, power chord-infused DC extended universe with added superhero badinage.
It didn’t work. Justice League was no better received than Snyder’s Batman vs Superman: Dawn of Justice. Meanwhile, Whedon seems somehow to have upset most of his cast, especially Ray Fisher (who plays Cyborg), the actor originally at the centre of the picture. Fisher tweeted that the director’s on-set behaviour was “gross, abusive, unprofessional and completely unacceptable”, and that it was “enabled” by Justice League producers Jon Berg and Geoff Johns. Berg denied Fisher’s accusations.
One thing is for sure: Leto wasn’t in the original theatrical cut of Justice League and, as far as we know, wasn’t part of the original Snyder plan either. Leto first played the Joker in 2016’s Suicide Squad, but despite attempts to get under the skin of the character with a slew of strange gifts sent to his co-stars, his performance ended up almost completely on the cutting-room floor. He won’t – as far as we know – be in the imminent sequel to that movie (next year’s creatively titled The Suicide Squad) either.
The critical failure of the original movie and his highly public disappointment at being almost entirely written out of it (not to mention Joaquin Phoenix going on to win an Oscar for playing the same character) led us to assume he would not be stepping back into the role any time soon. How wrong we were.
But Snyder’s Justice League has proved us wrong many times over. We thought Ben Affleck was a terrible, gun-toting, meatbrained Batman who would never again pull on the cape – yet he will be back as the dark knight in Justice League 2.0.
We thought bad superhero movies were supposed to be consigned to some bleak corner of Netflix rather than given a second chance when fans didn’t like them the first time around. We thought Snyder was a pretty terrible director of comic-book movies (Watchmen notwithstanding) who would never be given creative control over an entire ream of interconnected episodes.
In all these areas, we stand corrected. And now that Leto is also returning to show us how things really should have been, it is surely only a matter of time before HBO Max gives us Suicide Squad: the Leto cut, a three-hour edit consisting entirely of the Oscar-winner cavorting his way to method heaven amid a background of dead pigs and live rats. And yes, the fans apparently want this to happen too.
