The Killing Joke is one of those films that would have been a challenge to adapt. Despite the film being adapted into an animated feature, there was a lot of backlash about how the story was treated. Regardless, Bruce Timm had certain reservations about the adaptation from the beginning of production.
Timm revealed to Empire what his idea for the film was, and that pretty early on in the project, there was one aspect of the film that was set in stone from the very beginning. The film made a lot of changes from the source material, but this bit was to be kept as is, Bruce Timm revealed.
The Killing Joke part of The Killing Joke was not to be meddled with
There were a lot of changes made to The Killing Joke. The story was updated for a modern audience, and a lot more transpired between Batgirl and Batman before the story started. However, the latter half of the film is very accurate to the comics, which Bruce Timm revealed to Empire as a conscious decision. He said:
“This is really going to sound mercenary, but The Killing Joke part of the movie is something that we decided early on we weren’t going to try to “fix.” Even though I’ve always had issues with the original source material, it’s one of those books that I admire more than I love. “
The main story of Batman: The Killing Joke is considered to be one of the best stories to come out of DC, penned by Alan Moore. However, the film managed to water down a tightly-knit, well-written story so much that the fans altogether abandoned the film, leaving it dead in the water.
Bruce Timm and the creative team left all their tinkering in one part of the film
Timm revealed that the creative team did not touch the Killing Joke, and made all the changes that they wanted in the prelude, which was exclusive to the film.
Batman and Batgirl being in a relationship, as brief as it was, was an original part of the film, something that was absent from the comics. He said:
“Even though we had issues with certain things that happened, it’s, like, “Well, this is one of those classic stories.” Love it or not, we felt we just needed to kind of do a straight-up adaptation of it. So we didn’t deliberately tone anything down.
We didn’t deliberately change anything. We didn’t look at anything and say, “It’s just too disturbing, we can’t do that.” If we were going to do it, we were going to do it. So we left basically all of our tinkering to the Barbara Gordon/Batgirl prologue.”
The changes that were made to the story left a lot to be desired, and despite the backstory being put in to add more context to what transpires between the characters, the addition in tandem with the story altogether resulted in a film that was nothing more than a pale imitation of the source material.
