At the time, much was said about how awful The New Mutants was. When Disney acquired Fox in 2019, it promptly killed a live-action Lumberjanes show, threatened to get rid of Taika Waititi’s Jojo Rabbit for fear of offending brand loyalists with a happy-go-lucky Adolf Hitler, and shoved the perfectly lovely The New Mutants in the vault.

When Moore proposed the depravity to his editor, Len Wein, Wein supposedly said, “Yeah, okay, cripple the bitch.” Potentially interesting projects - anything that bothers the biggest exec in the room - get canceled or delayed or shoved into a vault somewhere, never to see the light of day. According to Variety, the film was tucked away, never to be seen, not because it was a bad movie but because the massive entity now known as Warner Bros. Later in the day, a much more plausible reason for the film’s vaulting appeared. Early reports claimed the film, expected to premiere exclusively on HBO Max, was canceled because it was of such poor quality it was “irredeemable,” as one source told the New York Post. Discovery wasn’t as cruel when it canceled the already completed Batgirl film this week.

They remember the book because Barbara Gordon, who had just retired as Batgirl, gets shot, stripped, photographed, and paralyzed by the Joker. But most people don’t remember the big face-off between the three men.

In the comic book, The Killing Joke, the Joker kidnaps and tortures Jim Gordon to see if he can drive him to the point of insanity that both the Joker and Batman have already reached in their own respective ways. In 1989, Alan Moore wanted to write a comic about what a man does when driven to the point of insanity.

Batman forever movie references