It’s official. Director Todd Phillips’ upcoming DC film Joker has been given an R rating by the Motion Picture Association of America.
Joker is rated R for “strong bloody violence, disturbing behavior, language and brief sexual images,” according to a rating displayed on the official movie website.
This shouldn’t come as too much a surprise to anyone who’s followed the film’s production, as those making it all-but-assured fans this would be an adult-oriented film more along the lines of James Mangold’s Logan, rather than something like Avengers: Endgame.
A representative for the Toronto International Film Festival, where Joker will be the first comic book movie screened as a Gala presentation in September, said the film brings to mind the works of Taxi Driver filmmaker Martin Scorsese and exhibits “an interesting tone and approach” to its DC Comics-inspired source material.
“It’s set in the late ’70s, early ’80s and it feels like it was made then. It’s gritty in its look,” Cameron Bailey, co-head and artistic director of TIFF, told the Toronto Sun. “It has references to Martin Scorsese’s filmmaking and it feels like a cinematic achievement on a high level. Although it’s working with very populist material, it has great ambition. That’s why it’s a Gala.”
Directed by Todd Phillips, Joker stars Joaquin Phoenix, Robert De Niro, Zazie Beetz, Bill Camp, Frances Conroy, Brett Cullen, Glenn Fleshler, Douglas Hodge, Marc Maron, Josh Pais and Shea Whigham. The film arrives in theaters Oct. 4.
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