The One Superhero Movie David Fincher Calls A Betrayal Of The Mentally Ill
David Fincher just torched modern Hollywood, holding up Joker as Exhibit A of a broken studio system that now greenlights what once would have been unthinkable.
I love a good filmmaker rant, and David Fincher just gave one worth unpacking. While talking to The Telegraph about where the movie business is at, he zeroed in on Joker and used it to make a bigger point about how the studio machine works now.
"I don’t think anyone would have looked at that material and thought, 'Yeah, let’s take [Taxi Driver's] Travis Bickle and [The King of Comedy's] Rupert Pupkin and conflate them, then trap him in a betrayal of the mentally ill, and trot it out for a billion dollars."
Fincher’s read on Joker
Fincher is not buying the idea that Joker was some bold, original swing. In his view, the movie takes the DNA of two Martin Scorsese antiheroes — Taxi Driver’s Travis Bickle and The King of Comedy’s Rupert Pupkin — and repackages their unsettling, psychologically fragile energy into something glossy and safe enough for a four-quadrant comic-book crowd.
He’s especially bothered by how the film uses discomfort as a selling point and frames Arthur Fleck’s mental illness as spectacle. Sure, the movie seems to sympathize with Arthur, but Fincher’s point is that it ultimately treats him like a product: a marketable tragedy engineered to move tickets and dominate the box office.
The Scorsese connection, spelled out
Travis and Rupert are deliberately alienating figures — lonely, unstable, and designed to make you uneasy, not to give you a cathartic, crowd-pleasing arc. Fincher sees Joker as lifting that template wholesale, only this time with guardrails on, because the studio knows exactly how to sell it.
The Ledger factor
Fincher also ties Joker’s existence to Heath Ledger’s performance in The Dark Knight, which he says changed what studios believed a mainstream audience would embrace. The logic: Ledger proved a layered, unsettling villain could be a phenomenon — and a profitable one — so a standalone Joker suddenly looked like a safe bet, not a gamble.
As he put it to The Telegraph, nobody in a boardroom would have assumed Joker could be a giant hit if The Dark Knight hadn’t been massive. Ledger’s legacy became a kind of safety net that made greenlighting Joker feel risk-free.
The bigger gripe about the system
- Joker isn’t a daring original in Fincher’s eyes; it’s a studio-safe remix of older, riskier character studies.
- It borrows heavily from Scorsese’s Travis Bickle and Rupert Pupkin, turning their discomfort into spectacle.
- Arthur’s mental illness is packaged as a product — empathy on the surface, commerce underneath.
- The movie’s path to success was paved by Heath Ledger’s Joker, which proved audiences would show up for a complex villain.
- Bottom line: studios reward what’s already validated. Originality doesn’t get funded until someone else proves it makes money.
Where to watch
If you want to revisit the movie at the center of all this, Joker is currently streaming on HBO Max in the US.