Exactly, The Joker can still be The Joker even without Batman, both Joker and Gotham have given us versions of Joker without Batman in the picture.
Which doesn't necessarily make it a good idea in either case.
But without Superman, Luthor would not be the same kind of character he becomes in the comics.
I'm not saying he would be. I'm saying he could still be an interesting enough character to be the lead role in a story. Part of the story of Lex Luthor is that he
could have had a compelling life of his own without Superman in the picture, or that he already had one before Superman arrived. The question of what he could've been without Superman, how he could've been different from what he became -- or the same in a different way -- is part of what makes him interesting. So the fact that he wouldn't be the same character is an integral part of my point.
No one was discussing a movie where the Joker is the only character.
They literally just released a movie where he's the lead character and we're supposed to sympathize with him. From what I hear, he's pretty much the only character in the movie who gets much development.
There's no reason you can't focus on the chaos and leave the (wannabe) hero(es) in the background.
Would that actually make a good story, or just an exercise in gratuitous violence? I'm reminded of
Adam-Troy Castro's comments on Facebook yesterday about
Brightburn, the "Superman origin as horror story" movie:
The problem is, Premise Alone, however energetically presented, is not the same thing as Story, and BRIGHTBURN is not a three-act play, but a one-act play. It goes everywhere you expect it to, and is the worst thing a horror story can be, a straight path to futility.
Chaos alone is not a narrative. Narrative has structure and direction, and chaos is the absence of those things.
You're not describing a character that sounds any less generically familiar and predictable.
That's because you can't judge the worth of a story by a one-paragraph summary. The execution is what matters. If you're determined to look for excuses to dismiss a story, then a brief summary of
any story is going to be easy to scoff at. "A movie about people who go into a bar in Casablanca looking for travel papers? Who would watch
that?" "A reporter tries to find out what a dead rich guy's last word meant?
Boo-ring!"
And yes, okay, I realize you could turn this right back around at me regarding my Joker opinions.
Maybe there's a way to make it work. But given what I know about both characters, I think there's a lot more to work with in Luthor's case than the Joker's. The new movie had to make up pretty much everything about its version of the Joker from whole cloth, unconnected to the comics. But Luthor has a rich backstory that could be drawn on for material -- several of them, in fact. So I just don't buy the idea that you couldn't do a compelling solo Luthor story. Paul Cornell has already proven that you can.
Not really. He can be the villain in his own story. Not every story is about a hero. And while I haven't seen it yet, the vast majority of accounts and reviews I've seen would seem to indicate they achieved it just fine first time out of the gate.
You've seen a different set of reviews than I have, then.
