Even attempting to live in the shadows of those movies means that you have aspirations, and in my opinion, Joker met them.
The thing about Joker is, it’s not your usual comic-book adaptation.
Director Todd Phillips based his exploration of the criminal mastermind on two seminal Martin Scorsese movies: Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy.
Recognizing it as a year-end awards contender doesn’t just validate the comic-book genre, it encourages more directors to take recognizable characters like this (think Logan) and treat them as serious subjects worthy of their own, adult-oriented stories.