Joker

Joker (2019)

67 mistakes

(20 votes)

Factual error: Based on the films being shown at the theater, the movie appears to be set in 1981. One of the TV commercials shows the Energizer Bunny, which didn't make its first appearance until 1988.

wizard_of_gore

Continuity mistake: When Joker is dancing on the stairs he throws his cigarette. Then when the cops arrive at the top of the stairs we see him blowing smoke from the same cigarette. Then the cigarette is gone again. (01:30:40)

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Suggested correction: They purposely stuck the images in a way that it repeats itself over and over again. It's intentionally made in a way of not flowing straightforward.

Factual error: In the beginning of the movie, while dancing with the sign, the guitars in the window of the music store are D'Angelico guitar designs that weren't released until the 2010s. (00:01:35)

Factual error: The cart behind Arthur during his dance for the kids has drawers of different colors. That is color coding reflecting the Broselow Tape, a tool used to measure pediatric patients and give estimates of the appropriate scaling for treatments. It's a system that started only in 1985, while the movie takes place in 1981. (00:28:05)

Sammo

Factual error: In the elevator, Arthur meets the single mom living on the same floor, Sophie Dumond. In Sophie's shopping bag, the one recognizable food item is a box of Betty Crocker's Hamburger Helper - Potato Stroganoff. Thing is, the packaging uses (look at the design of the 'menu idea') a design predating the introduction of the Helping Hand mascot, which happened in the late 70s. She just bought it, it can't be ancient, long expired food. (00:19:35)

Sammo

Continuity mistake: Right at the beginning of the dance in the children ward, the kid with a blue hat on Arthur's right is sitting cross-legged with the hospital robe covering his calves and feet. At the first cut, his jammies and socks become visible. (00:28:05)

Sammo

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Suggested correction: The sign with "everything must go" breaks at the exact same second as it hits Arthur, and there is no point to make it somehow break by some weird special effect without any sense.

Factual error: When Joker is following his neighbor to her work, the 'no standing' sign is not from the time period. Also when Joker is fleeing from two police officers into the subway at 18 avenue, the subway sign with the red EXIT background is not of the time period.

Continuity mistake: Murray's blue jacket, when he comes out from behind the curtain his jacket is open, than he makes a twirl and the first button of the jacket is buttoned up.

Factual error: The ambulance that crashes into the police car Joker is riding in towards the end of movie has the styling of a contemporary vehicle, not one from the early 1980s.

Other mistake: In a city of millions and millions of inhabitants, when the protagonist chases his neighbour till she enters the building in William Street, the taxi that passes in front of him as he crosses the road is the same taxi with license plate T 9362 that nearly ran him over at the very beginning when he was trying to get his sign back. Which incidentally is a model of Chevy Caprice post-1981 (likely a 1987 Caprice). (00:02:25 - 00:24:35)

Sammo

Audio problem: The police officers chase Arthur to the subway. When the subway train starts moving after they just barely got in, the sound resembles the acceleration sound of a R143 subway car, which actually didn't exist until 2001, but it's a much older car, the R32.

Plot hole: Arthur's appearance on the talk show makes hardly any sense. The show is a close port of Johnny Carson's Tonight show, for a huge audience, and yet he receives no screening at all, they put him (someone NOBODY in the staff knows the first thing about) on the air literally without a clue of what he is gonna do or say, and wearing a highly controversial costume. And, when he murders Murray, it is implied that everyone was able to see him doing that right away and he is cut 'off the air' at some point, as if the show were really live, which is preposterous for this sort of program outside of specific events (similar to how in contemporary TV "Jimmy Kimmel Live!", is not live). Even earlier when Arthur opened the letter his mom addressed to Wayne, you could hear the end credits of "Live with Murray Franklin" with the announcer saying the show is "Taped live in front of a studio audience." (00:48:00)

Sammo

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Suggested correction: I don't see this is a problem due to the fact that we can't be sure what really happens as apposed to what only happens in Arthur's mind. So if the whole TV show appearance is just another fantasy, he would have skipped the who screening process.

You are free to treat the whole movie as something where things don't make sense because in the fan theory of your liking it's all meant to have subtle hints that the movie is all a fantasy, but the movie does not present that particular talk show scene as a dream sequence. It'd be silly to nitpick the logic in the scene when he is picked from the audience by Murray at the beginning because it's obviously presented as nothing more than his fantasy, but his appearance on the show is what the movie built up to up to that point and is not treated as a parenthesis where logic should be suspended, nor disproven like the scenes with his girlfriend standing in.

Sammo

Continuity mistake: When Joker is in the police car, the left eye paint flows across the corner of his mouth. Then the car crashes, people pull him out of the car, and the paint just reaches his nose. Then he stands up and the previous style is back. (01:46:50 - 01:50:10)

struemuhu

Factual error: When Joaquin Phoenix and Zazie Beetz are taking a walk after Arthur's performance, between the arcade and the newsstand there's a modern video intercom with keypad, not quite fitting the 1981 setting, since the first model of its kind was introduced in 1984 (kinda odd to leave something like this in when they went through the trouble of placing appropriate arcade posters really close by). (00:45:25)

Sammo

Factual error: Following Zazie Beetz, Arthur arrives in front of the bank. The crossing is using red colored tactile paving. While technically already invented, truncated domes paving was not adopted in the US in the early 80s, but began appearing in the early 1990s at public transportation stations, and it was not until 2001 that they were used in curb cuts. (00:24:35)

Sammo

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Suggested correction: By the directors own admission, the date the movie is set in is never mentioned, nor is there any mention of a real city it is set in. This movie is set in Gotham City, a city that exists only in the Joker universe, where this paving could have been invented years earlier than the corresponding year in our (real) universe. This is more of a trivia than a mistake.

By the director's own movie, everything about the setting is specific to the early 80s. It's a marginal part of the urban scenery that they didn't find important (or did not think of, it's not exactly obvious) to fix for consistency. I don't see why we have to think that a movie that deliberately puts real life advertising, technology, aesthetics specific to the 1980s (Philips even mentioned specifically in interviews that he had in mind New York City of the year 1981) and flaunts the marginalization and cruelty of society would encourage leaving in deliberately something that improves quality of life for the handicapped. It's the classic mistake of something not supposed to be there that needed to be covered but was not.

Sammo

Continuity mistake: When Arthur imagines that he is on Franklin's TV show the button on Murray's jacket is off then on. (00:12:20)

oswal13

Continuity mistake: Arthur is taking notes during the standup comedian's performance. There are a cigarette lighter and a packet next to him on the table; in the close-up that follows, they have changed position. (00:25:45)

Sammo

Continuity mistake: After the gig at the comedy club, Arthur and the neighbour Sophie pass in front of a newsstand. The copy of the Examiner saying "Killer Clown On The Loose" is kept in place by a clothing pin placed diagonally, top right-to-bottom left. In the close-up when Arthur looks at it, the pin is top left-to-bottom right. (00:45:25)

Sammo

Social Worker: What's so funny?
Arthur Fleck: I was just thinking... just thinking of a joke.
Social Worker: Do you wanna tell it to me?
Arthur Fleck: You wouldn't get it.

More quotes from Joker

Trivia: While the time period of the movie isn't explicitly stated, the movies showing at the cinema the Waynes are at (Zorro The Gay Blade, Wolfen, Excalibur, and Arthur) were all released in 1981, making that the likely year it's set. The Zorro reference is certainly a nod to established comic continuity, where the Waynes were watching The Mark Of Zorro.

More trivia for Joker

Question: Spoiler! The scene at the very end, with Arthur locked up talking to the doctor/social worker - is that meant to be later, after he's been captured again, or is it a flashback to when he was hospitalised before, as was referenced earlier in the movie?

Jon Sandys

Answer: This is later, as the building appears to be Arkham. He's committed there instead of going to jail based on his insanity. It appears he is laughing about the death of Thomas Wayne, we see a flash of that scene again for a reason.

lionhead

Chosen answer: I think it's meant to be deliberately ambiguous. I took at as him being locked up for his crimes, but others have commented that they think he was always locked up and the entire movie takes place in his head.

Phaneron

More questions & answers from Joker

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