Anna Daniels
According to Smith, there would have been a brief flashback to the climactic riot (during which a follower of Phoenix’s Arthur Fleck shoots and kills Thomas and Martha Wayne) during the film’s closing scene in the hospital. You’ll recall that Fleck begins to chuckle, telling his attending nurse that he “thought of something funny”; it’s here that he says the flashback would have taken place.
In it, we would have seen that it wasn’t one of Fleck’s followers, but Fleck himself who gunned down the Waynes. As he turned to leave, he would have been stopped in his tracks by the sound of young Bruce Wayne screaming and crying over the bodies of his parents. At that point, Fleck would have turned around, shrugged nonchalantly — and shot Bruce as well.
If this is indeed accurate — and, again, we really have no reason to think that it’s not — it’s pretty easy to see why Phillips chose to cut the scene. His cold-blooded murder of a child (especially the future Batman, for cripes’ sake) would have removed any of the sympathy the audience had ever had for Fleck, and while it’s true that the event could have been chalked up to the fact that Fleck is not exactly a reliable narrator, seeing this take place onscreen may simply have been too much for some viewers to handle.
Plus, the alternate ending would have led many a viewer to blurt out exactly what Smith did at the conclusion of his story: “What the f***? The world has no Batman!”
Written by: Looper
