Jared Leto’s Joker has a whole new look in the Snyder Cut

The Snyder Cut, director Zack Snyder’s reboot of his movie Justice League, is nearly here. At four hours long, the movie promises to be a very different experience than the ones fans got in 2017, which was completed by Avengers director Joss Whedon after Snyder had to step away due to a family emergency. There’s a lot of new footage, both stuff Snyder shot but couldn’t use for the original and some brand new stuff.

Among the brand new stuff is a scene featuring Jared Leto’s take on the Joker…kind of. Leto played the Clown Prince of Crime in 2016’s Suicide Squad, but he never really got to interact with Ben Affleck’s version of Batman, who is here as well. Snyder wanted to fix that. “It seemed uncool to me that we would make it all the way through this incarnation of Batman and Joker without seeing them come together,” he told Vanity Fair.

That said, the new scene doesn’t directly follow up on anything that happened in Suicide Squad. (SPOILERS incoming!) Batman will talk with the Joker in a vision he has of a post-apocalyptic Earth, revealing what will happen if he and the other members of the Justice League fail to step the supervillain Darkseid from taking over the planet. That might explain why Leto’s Joker looks so different here than he did in Suicide Squad:

Why does the Joker look different in the Snyder Cut?

No more slicked back green hair, no more face tattoos; this Joker looks more like the Crow if he got committed. “Who knows what’s happened,” Snyder said. “I don’t know if he’s wearing makeup, I don’t know what’s happening. It’s hard to say exactly.”

Basically, it sounds like Snyder wants to give us this cool new take on the Joker and isn’t overly concerned with the details, although any continuity issues can pretty easily be waved away by the fact that it’s a psychic vision/dream sequence/flash-forward/whatever.

But the scene does tie into some of the stuff Snyder set up in earlier movies. “The scene explains why Bruce had the Joker card taped to his gun that you see in Batman v Superman,” he said about the 2016 film, which hinted that the Joker had murdered Batman’s sidekick Robin at some point in the past, a huge event in the comics. “I’d always wanted to explore the death of Robin. And if there ever was going to be a next movie, which, of course, there probably won’t be, I wanted to do a thing where in flashbacks we learn how Robin died, how Joker killed him and burned down Wayne Manor, and that whole thing that happened between he and Bruce.”

Zack Snyder’s Justice League, aka the Snyder Cut, hits HBO Max on March 18.

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