In the grand scheme of things, Jared Leto’s involvement in Zack Snyder’s Justice League was nothing but pure fan service. There was no reason for the Joker to show up in the epilogue as part of the ragtag group of heroes and villains cobbled together in the Knightmare timeline, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t awesome.
Snyder admitted that he only included the scene so that he got the chance to film an exchange between Ben Affleck’s Batman and his arch-nemesis before he bowed out of the DCEU, and their brief face-to-face was one of the four-hour epic’s standout moments. Inevitably, it made fans want to see even more of the duo, and while the rumor mill shot into overdrive in the aftermath of HBO Max’s Justice League, there’s been no word on Leto’s future as of yet.
However, the Academy Award winner did share some Knightmare fan art on his own social media accounts, and you can check out the images that originally came from digital artist Hasan Kazi below.
The new and improved Justice League may have been R-rated, but it’s doubtful that Snyder was planning to have Batman decapitated in his planned sequels. Then again, we do know that the Dark Knight wasn’t going to make it out of the mooted trilogy alive, so perhaps the fan art is closer to what the director had in mind than you might think.
At the height of the #RestoreTheSnyderVerse movement, barely a day went by without Leto finding himself linked to a new feature film or streaming series, but the scuttlebutt has been reduced to less than a whisper in the aftermath, even if you get the impression he’d be more than game for another round as the Clown Prince of Crime.
