Sorry, 'shippers: Robert Pattinson's Batman will never meet Joaquin Phoenix's Joker

Indicating that Warner Bros. and DC may have actually learned a lesson from its desperate need to compete with Marvel Studios by forcing together a cinematic universe out of movies that didn’t necessarily deserve one, Joker director Todd Phillips ha declared that Joaquin Phoenix’s Clown Prince Of Crime will “definitely not” meet the new Robert Pattinson Batman in some future crossover movie. It’s almost like the studio is actually committing to the idea that not everything needs to be part of a larger universe and that one of the reasons the Joker movie looks so interesting to people is that it isn’t carrying any of the baggage that every other comic book movie comes with these days, which is good.

That comes from a quick Variety story, in which Phillips is also quoted as saying that there will surely be “many more Jokers” in the future after his movie comes out—meaning that there will be other Batman movies with other actors in clown makeup smashing mirrors and laughing in a scary way. To that we say: Yeah, duh. Robert Pattinson’s Batman will probably even fight some new Joker in a few years, and Jared Leto’s Joker will probably turn up somewhere again (either in James Gunn’s new Suicide Squad or in the Birds Of Prey movie). But yeah, this Joker is not going to meet that Batman, but a Joker will obviously meet a Batman at some point—and even that somehow doesn’t happen, we’ve got decades and decades of stories to go back to about the rich guy in a cape beating the snot out of the scary guy in makeup.