This report has been updated with new quotes from the director of Joker.
Sorry, Bat-fans, but by all accounts the Joker movie won’t connect to Matt Reeves’ upcoming reboot The Batman, set to star Robert Pattinson. During our recent interview with Joker director Todd Phillips, the filmmaker elaborated on why Joker is a standalone film about a world where Batman doesn’t yet exist. Although young Bruce Wayne is a character in the film, Joker focuses more on Thomas Wayne than his son — although Phillips was intrigued by what a Bruce Wayne/Batman would be like in Joker’s more realistic, period setting.
“We didn’t want to make a Batman movie,” Phillips said when we asked him about the prominence of Thomas Wayne as a character in Joker. “If we changed that whole thing to suddenly it’d be Bruce Wayne and Batman would exist and all these other things that come with Batman that we were consciously trying to avoid. That was a clever or not clever solution to avoiding Batman altogether and being able to make a Joker movie where basically Batman doesn’t exist yet.”
Source: IGN.com Joker Wasn't Made to Connect to Robert Pattinson's Batman