The press release detonated at 8:00 AM. Not a minute before, not a minute after. It arrived as a single line-item in the inboxes of every studio publicist, trades editor, and media influencer west of the Dan Ryan—subject:
"CASTING ANNOUNCEMENT – JOKER PRINCIPAL."
The email was un-styled, almost rude in its austerity: black Helvetica on white, no body text, a single hyperlinked PDF.
The attachment was worse.
No PR preamble, no gushing executive quotes, no staged on-set photo.
Just a matte-black production logo, the date, and an eleven-word statement:
"Marcus Vale cast as The Joker in upcoming Nolan production."
Below, in grayscale, was a headshot: shadowed, almost medical in its lighting, exposing only a raked cheekbone, a slice of sharp jaw, and two eyes rendered predatory by the pixelation.
The face looked unfinished.
Or maybe unfinished was the point.
For a beat—just a beat—the world held its breath.
Then, all at once, every subroutine and parasite in the entertainment ecosystem went to work.
By 8:01, the news had jumped the firewall to Deadline, then Variety, then the lower tiers of the food chain. The copy was always the same, a clone of the original:
"Christopher Nolan's highly anticipated untitled project lands Marcus Vale, an unknown, in pivotal Joker role."
Some outlets kept the word "unknown" in the headline; others, perhaps mindful of past casting disasters, softened it to "breakout" or "enigmatic." None could find a single credit to his name. The comments, within seconds, turned feral.
who the fuck is marcus vale?
Wasn't Joker supposed to go to a STAR?
He looks like a school shooter.
Lmao, did someone lose a bet?
What followed was a chain reaction in the industry's nervous system. Agents in midtown scrambled through databases, cross-referencing the name and coming up empty.
"There's no reel, no tape, not even a fucking TikTok," said one, tossing the phone across the breakfast table and into a bowl of chia pudding.
An assistant at CAA forwarded the PDF to her boss and, for the first time in her career, received an all-caps reply:
FIND OUT WHO OWNS HIM. NOW.
Somewhere in Beverly Hills, a junior executive at Warner Bros—fresh from Pilates, hair still wet under a towel—opened the press release, did a double-take, and let her designer coffee slip, splattering oat milk foam across the touchpad of her laptop.
By the time she finished cleaning it up, her phone was already pinging with "urgent" messages, half of them screen-grabs of the Vale headshot, the rest wild speculations.
The official press line held, for the first thirty minutes. It was a monument to plausible deniability, every soundbite sanitized and sanded to a safe, featureless finish.
"Christopher Nolan has always had a vision for the Joker that transcends expectations," said a placeholder statement from the studio's PR division. "Marcus Vale brings a once-in-a-generation energy to the role."
But the unofficial line—what agents whispered, what old-guard studio heads hissed in corner offices, what underpaid assistants typed into private Discords—spread ten times faster:
"Didn't Nolan turn down half of Hollywood for this?"
"He must've blown someone's mind in the audition. Or something else."
"I heard he didn't even have to read. Just walked in and they signed him."
"The eyes, though. Those are not normal eyes."
On the group chat for a mid-level marketing firm, the Vale photo became the new sticker—his face, all angles and shadows, pasted onto everything from baby Yoda to last year's Joker mugshot.
For every three snide comments, there was one from someone who'd seen the "viral" audition video, or at least the rumors about it.
These comments, always bracketed with "no joke" or "seriously though," never failed to bring up the thing with the laugh.
"Heard he made the casting director cry?"
"Supposedly, he didn't break character ONCE."
"You think they're gonna go method again?"
Elsewhere, in the city's most expensive breakfast meeting—a room so thick with money and hangover sweat it could have been a campaign headquarters—two development execs huddled over the PDF, dissecting the move with all the subtlety of a vivisection.
"Guy has no paper trail. None," said the first, a man whose scalp shone with the careful polish of power.]
The other frowned. "So who the hell is he? Some influencer? A Russian asset?"
"Apparently Nolan went nuclear at the last audition. Said he'd found 'the only one who could make it work.' Fired the rest of the shortlist, on the spot."
The first exec let out a whistle. "And they just… announced it? Like that?"
"No time to slow-roll it. Twitter was already onto it by 7:55. Probably some leak from the test shoot."
They both studied the headshot, the uncanny valley of its perfection. The second exec shook his head, awed and disquieted.
"I don't buy it. There's gotta be a catch."
In every coffee shop, gym locker room, and rideshare commute, the same conversation pinballed through the morning: is this a disaster, or is it genius? Is it both?
Even the outliers—comic book purists, cosplay obsessives, the four remaining people still mad about Batfleck—found themselves drawn to the image, unable to look away. There was something about the photo. Maybe it was the eyes, or the way the bone structure hinted at a permanent smirk, but even in low-res, you could feel the vector of attention tilt toward the man in the photo.
By 8:35, the first meme cycle was over.
The news had metastasized.
By 8:40, the snark began to curdle into something else.
The takes got hotter, the stakes got weirder. There was already a Change.org petition to "#STOPTHEJOKER" trending on TikTok, and a rival campaign, "#LetValeCook," surging in response. A minor YouTuber filmed a six-minute hot take ("Nolan's Ego Has Finally Killed Batman"), which was immediately outpaced by a TikTok of a girl in clown makeup lip-syncing to a slowed-down remix of the press release. The comments under both were functionally identical:
Dude looks like he's gonna murder ME through the screen.
We wanted Heath Ledger, we got Hot Topic.
He's not even smiling in the pic. Power move.
Who is this guy and why do I want to fuck him and die at the same time???
And, from someone with an industry blue check: "Reminds me of when everyone lost their minds over Ledger. Look how that turned out."
The press release was still rippling outward, but it had already become irrelevant. The story wasn't what they announced. The story was how everyone else reacted.
At 8:57, a second email arrived, this time with an updated headshot. Same face, but a different angle—one that made the mouth look wider, the teeth whiter, the gaze more alive. Some offices didn't even bother opening it; by now, it was already on a million phones, a million screens, a million lips.
For the rest of the day, the world spun around a single axis. Everything else—the markets, the wars, the weather—became B-roll. Even the people who claimed not to care, not to be "movie people," found themselves circling back to the name.
Marcus Vale.
The industry had always liked its villains a certain way: larger than life, but safe enough for lunch meetings. Now, they had one who'd walked in through the front door and, somehow, locked it behind him.
In the downtown studio, where the announcement had been authored, the office manager watched the numbers climb: first the open rates, then the page hits, then the trending topics. She tried to recall the last time a casting news had detonated like this. It hadn't, not since Ledger, maybe not since Nicholson.
She wondered if anyone would ever remember the names of the people who'd orchestrated this, or if it would all just be a footnote, another viral moment washed away by the next disaster.
She scrolled the press release, then scrolled again, as if searching for a hidden message.
There wasn't one. Not in the text, not in the PDF, not in the photos.
The message was the silence. The negative space where every other name, every other credential, should have been.
By lunch, the city was sick with the name. Every TV was tuned to it, every phone vibrating with it, every person, in some small, traitorous way, carrying it with them. Even the ones who laughed loudest, who mocked the hardest—they were the first to refresh the page, waiting for the next flash of information.
In a city built on illusion, this was the only thing that felt real.
And at the center of it, grinning in the dark, was the man no one had ever heard of, the man whose eyes, even in grayscale, made it clear that whatever happened next would belong to him, and him alone.
......
[Okay, I'm thinking we could set targets going forward with power stones. I don't know much about what would be acceptable but we could figure something out. Let me know what you guy's think.
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