The People's Joker (2024) on Netflix
NR20241h 32mComedyDramaFantasy
In a world monitored by Batman, a child in Smallville who wonders about her gender idolizes the performers on UCB Live. In Gotham City, a computer sorts the hopefuls into roles.
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- Netflix4.0/5
- IMDb6.3/102,321 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes96%
Trailer
Plot summary
Her mother, alarmed when the young girl asks whether she was born in the wrong body, takes her to Dr. Crane at Arkham Asylum, who supplies Smylex, a medication that keeps the face pleasant while depression, anxiety or gender dysphoria persist beneath it. Fifteen years later she travels to Gotham City and tries out for the cast of the sketch show UCB Live. A computer makes her a Jokeman, a role that comes with an identity of its own, while the women are all Harlequins dancing behind the leads. On-air work costs $15,000 and improv lessons from Ra's al Ghul. She befriends Oswald Cobblepot, another comic who cannot pay the fee, and the two plan a troupe of their own, which they call anti-comedy.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The People's Joker (2024)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Shortly before its premiere, Vera Drew says a media conglomerate sent her an angry letter pressuring her not to screen The People's Joker; some outlets assumed it was Warner Bros. Discovery, the parent company of DC Comics, but neither Drew nor the studio has confirmed it.
- A day after The People's Joker premiered at the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival, its subsequent screenings were canceled; the festival's website said the filmmaker had withdrawn it due to rights issues.
- On September 21, Vera Drew announced cancellation of the film's other scheduled festival screenings, yet it was still shown surreptitiously, including at the 2023 Wisconsin Film Festival, where it was billed as a "Secret Screening" on April 14.
- Vera Drew originally planned to re-edit "every single Batman movie" along with other films to make The People's Joker, but those scenes were later edited out.
- Vera Drew crowdsourced both the budget and the artwork for The People's Joker; more than 100 artists provided backdrops and character animation for the film.
- Co-writer Bri LeRose encouraged Vera Drew to re-edit Joker in late 2019, and while working on it Drew began to see the Batman characters as reflecting her own life and felt she needed a big creative project around gender, comedy and her mom.
