Warner Bros. quashed an unauthorized Joker movie. Inside the director's fight to save it

On the eve of the premiere of "The People's Joker," a parody origin story envisioning the Batman villain as a transgender woman trying to break into comedy, Vera Drew thought she was in the clear.

The filmmaker, who jokingly calls herself "the transgender Forrest Gump of alternative comedy" after working with the likes of Eric Andre, Tim Heidecker & Eric Wareheim, Scott Aukerman and Sacha Baron Cohen, was certain that viewers would never mistake her absurdist, autobiographical — and unauthorized — queer coming-of-age film, in which the titular heroine battles gender dysphoria and a toxic romance with a fellow comedian, for an official DC Comics movie such as 2019's "Joker."

Then, hours before the film's first scheduled press screening and midnight premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, came The Letter.

In it, Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns the DC Comics intellectual property, objected to the film's public performance, reproduction and distribution as an infringement on their copyright. "While Ms. Drew's personal experience is moving and compelling, copyright law prohibits appropriating the Batman character and universe as the vehicle for telling that story," it read.

Though the letter did not indicate what, if any, actions the company would take should the film be screened, the potential costs of a protracted legal battle left Drew, who had obtained legal advice in support of her claim to fair use of the Joker and other characters, "shattered." "They would be able to keep