Source: deccomics.com

7. Who’s the Antagonist?

Yeah, here’s the bigger problem with Joker as protagonist stories. Who in the hell is a better villain than the Joker?

Anyone you put up against him is just going to be lame in comparison. What, you’re gonna have the Joker fight some mob boss in his solo movie? Do you know how many boring nameless mob boss villains there are? The villain of a movie needs to be more menacing than the hero or else there’s no tension. Can you honestly imagine a way to make a more menacing villain than The Joker without just minimizing the Joker’s villainy?

Because I can’t really. The only way is to make The Joker lamer. Because Joker is about as far as you can push a villain before he gets to pure boring randomness. We’ll talk about that in a bit but no one wants to see a fight between the Joker and the double Joker. That sounds like the world’s most boring movie.

And a fight between A Bad Guy and a watered down Joker won’t please anyone either.