This past weekend gave us our best look yet at Zack Snyder's Justice League, a four-episode miniseries that will finally give fans the version of DC's Justice League movie that so many have been calling for, for so long. It promises to be a radical departure from the version released in theaters that almost certainly would have taken the DC film universe in a new direction. Fans are, as one might expect, pouring over the new trailer frame by frame, and in doing so, a reference to another piece of that DC Universe has been found.
In a shot from the new trailer that shows the wasteland we glimpsed in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, we see a joker playing card float past the camera. It's a nice nod that has the fans of the DC Universe Joker, the one played by Jared Leto, very excited.
Of course, this doesn't mean we should expect to see the Joker pop up in Zack Snyder's Justice League. This shot is part of a dystopian future where the card may have survived, but the Joker himself is probably dead, or if not he has other things to do more important than causing trouble for Batman. But even so, it's a nice reference to the popular character.
And it's not impossible that we could see more overt and specific references to Joker in Zack Snyder's Justice League. Batman v Superman was technically the DC Universe film who introduced the character, showing us the Robin costume that the Joker had inked. We got a reference to Batman's sidekick being killed by Joker, a famous arc from the comics, and it's always possible that in the four hours of story we're going to get, we could see more details to help fill in this part of Batman's backstory.
Of course, the particular fan posting this image has a vested interest in the fact that a joker card appears in Zack Snyder's Justice League, as they want to see David Ayer's Suicide Squad, that movie with Jared Leto's Joker, get the same treatment that Justice League is now seeing. While the call for a version of Suicide Squad closer to David Ayer's vision hasn't built quite the fan base that the "Snyder Cut" did, there are a lot of people who want to see that movie as well. And who knows? Now that the precedent has been set, such a thing is at least possible.
More than likely there will be a lot more references to discover throughout the new version of Justice League. And probably at least one more trailer to dig through, as the new series won't be arriving on HBO Max until some time in 2021.
