One has even made a lot of awards, winning first at the Venice Film Festival and then at the Oscars. We are talking about The Joker. For those unfamiliar with the Batmam saga it is only a question of retracing the fate of a boy with great environmental and family problems, who becomes a criminal almost as a reaction to all the injustices he has had to suffer. Instead, for those who are passionate about the comic, it is a prequel, that is, a story that takes place before the usual time setting for that superhero, which then sees Batman fearless defender of Gotham City assisted by his young friend Robin. Here Robin has not yet been born and Batman is not yet born but he is Bruce Wayne, a rich boy and scion of a wealthy family who will then be massacred by the Joker. But all this will happen later, if not what prequel would it be? And above all: how could it have been possible to get across the politically correct message that even the worst offender became a criminal due to a difficult childhood?
In truth, there was already room for other prequels in the Batman movie saga. After Tim Burton had relaunched the darkest superhero first with Batman and then Batman Returns in the late 1980s, the modest Joel Schumacher had thought of burying him in a whirlwind of (useless) smashing special effects in Batman Forever (19959 and Batman & Robin (1997). The hero of Gotham City with this two film falls in the approval rating and so the production hires a young director who had already been noticed, Christopher Nolan, offers him young (Christian Bale) and mature (Michael Caine) actors. and offers him to tell how the Dark Knight first revealed himself.Nolan recounts the dawn of the story, and Batman returns to enjoy public favor thanks to Batman Begins (2005).
Telling the heroes’ past, however, can sometimes be risky. The greatest danger is to ruin one’s fantasies. In the comics the prequel often appears, sometimes with excellent results (The past of Tex is one of the most beautiful episodes of the Italian prince comic, invented 80 years ago by Gianluigi Bonelli with a story that saw him already engaged in medias res against his persecutors , because the background is perfectly consistent with the idea that one has made of the character) sometimes with very modest results (all the forays into Diabolik’s past, for example, are sugary, including the fact that he becomes a criminal after a shipwreck because his savior kills a panther….). Even in the cinema we see many. Sometimes they are just previous adventures to those already known (Indiana Jones and the cursed temple, the second in the series, is located in the year preceding Raiders of the Lost Ark, the progenitor). The Godfather Part II also places the action for much of the film before the first episode. Both films did well, but down from the series debut. Instead X-Men: The Beginning, released in 2011, fared much better than the film versions that preceded it, but perhaps this is because Bryan Singer knows how to direct an action movie.
And then there are the prequels to the TV series. We will mention an Italian one: Suburra (the action of the series is placed earlier than what we saw in the film), and a very recent American, I sopranos (the son of James Gandolfini is hired to tell why at the end of the 1960s the Italian-American community and the Afro-American one definitively entered into bitter conflict.In short, we are facing a real boom, with alternating results which, however, do not stop the phenomenon.
Are there any explanations? We risk one. Today the films are financed on the screenplay, and the evaluators of the televisions and platforms demand a detailed description of what will happen. Therefore, from their point of view, it is easier to send something known than a completely new subject. The risks are lower, the investment is almost entirely amortized. Clint Eastwood says business graduates are destroying Hollywood. They may not destroy it, but the flattening is largely due to their formulas, including the one that governs the prequels.