It’s been a long, weird road for The People’s Joker, director Vera Drew’s DC satire that uses superhero tropes and characters to explore the transgender experience. The movie premiered at the Toronto Film Festival in 2022, but all subsequent screenings were canceled after Warner Bros. Discovery reportedly issued a claim of copyright infringement.
This only fueled interest in the mixed-media parody, which screened again at the 2023 Outfest Film Festival in Los Angeles, then got a limited theatrical release in 2024. The People’s Joker has also streamed on Mubi, a subscription streaming service for independent and international films, since 2024. But now, Drew’s superhero sendup will reach its widest audience yet as the movie is set to arrive on Tubi sometime in January.
The news was revealed during an episode of Shuffle Up and Play, a Magic: The Gathering YouTube show featured on the popular channel Tolarian Community College. In the episode, Drew joined three other Magic players for a game, and used the opportunity to promote The People’s Joker‘s arrival on Tubi. While the film isn’t available on the free-with-ads streaming service just yet, Polygon has confirmed that it will arrive in January, according to a representative from the film’s distributor, Altered Innocence.
Polygon also reached out to Tubi for confirmation, but we have yet to receive a response.
This is more good news for a little film that could. We were big fans of The People’s Joker out of that infamous TIFF screening and have delighted in talking to Drew over the years. The film was a major step forward for both the inversion of pop culture icons and, in Drew’s mind, a trans filmmaker telling a real story about real people. As she told Polygon in 2024:
“If you’re watching a movie like this, where there’s a very clear main character — I hijack your brain for 92 minutes, and force you to look inside mine. So don’t you want to see somebody change and grow? Don’t you want to see somebody start as a villain, and either become more of a villain, or become a hero by the end, or oscillate somewhere in between throughout? That’s what storytelling is. That’s what mythmaking is. I get the sentiment. Representation is important. But I think the way to properly represent trans people is to treat them like human beings in film, and not like perfect angels or disgusting perverts. Somewhere in between.”
