Copyright Concerns Make a Film Festival Pull 'People's Joker' Movie

"There's a new Joker movie coming out," writes the Verge, "but you might not get a chance to see it because copyright is broken." I'm not talking about Joker: Folie à Deux, the officially sanctioned sequel to the Todd Phillips film Joker. I'm talking about The People's Joker, a crowdfunded Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) selection that was pulled at the last minute, thanks to unspecified "rights issues." The People's Joker is (as far as I can tell) an extremely loose retelling of the Batman villain's origin story, reinterpreting the Joker as a trans woman trying to break into the mob-like world of Gotham's stand-up comedy scene. Its trailer describes it as "an illegal comic book movie," but its creators more seriously defend it as an unauthorized but legal parody of DC's original character, to the point of (apparently) giving their lawyer a full-screen credit. I have no idea if The People's Joker is a good movie — thanks to its cancelation, my colleague Andrew Webster couldn't catch it at TIFF. The piece is clearly a provocation designed to thumb its nose at DC's copyright, and DC parent company Warner Bros. hasn't said whether it actually ordered TIFF to cancel showings — it's possible the festival balked or even that Drew did it herself. But despite all that, one thing is very clear: outside a tiny number of corporate behemoths, virtually nobody benefits from shutting down The People's Joker — not the filmmakers, not the public, and not the people who created Gotham City in the first place. Writer-director Vera Drew says she made The People's Joker partly to test a contemporary truism: that beloved fictional universes are a shared modern mythology, and people draw meaning from them the way that artists once reinterpreted Greek myths or painted Biblical figures. As Drew has put it, "if the purpose of myth is to learn about the human experience and grow and also chart your progress — the hero's journey and all that stuff — let's actually do that earnestly with these characters." The essay delves into the argument that culture exists for the common good. "It's useful to have a temporary period where artists can maintain control over their work because it helps support them financially and encourages them to make more of it. But the ultimate goal is that art should pass into the public domain and that it should be part of a conversation, with people repurposing it to create their own work...." In an interview with Comic Book Resources, the filmmaker said the film was protected by both fair use and copyright law. "The only thing that makes it weird in both of those categories is nobody's ever taken characters and IP and really personalized it in this way. So I think that's the thing that really kind of makes it seem a lot more dangerous than I actually 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 your butts in the seats. Mission accomplished." A statement from the filmmaker on Twitter blames "a media conglomerate that shall remain nameless" for an angry letter pressuring them not to screen the film. (It was ultimately allowed to premiere, but then pulled from later screenings.) They added that they were disappointed since "I went to great lengths with legal counsel to have it fall under parody/fair use," but they made the choice to protect the film festival and the future prospects for a possible return of the movie itself. "The People's Joker will screen again very soon at several other festivals worldwide." The Verge's conclusion? "If a law meant to protect artists is leaving weird independent movies in limbo to protect a corporate brand, something has gone deeply wrong." Thanks to Slashdot reader DevNull127 for the article

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