Film Theory: Joker is a Billionaire! (Batman The Dark Knight)

matpat my son we need to have a talk your father and i are very concerned about this whole youtube thing when are you planning to stop making little online vlog videos and get out there and get a real job hey look at me hey i really look like a guy with a plan [Music] hello internet welcome to film theory a show that goes into each episode with no plan we just do things and hope that each step in our insanely detailed takeover of youtube falls precisely into place speaking of taking over youtube today is a huge day in that plan today we are launching the first new theory channel in over six years oh my god has it really been that long six years introducing food theory yep we're theorizing about food with five new theory episodes for you to watch right now after you finish this one and i know that theorizing about food may sound weird at first but the same deep research over analysis science and speculation that we put to use on superheroes cartoons and disney over here absolutely apply to the very real world topics of cooking shopping restaurant psychology lies that the food industry is telling us everything for instance did you know that coffee is probably the thing responsible for the creation of modern physics or that if you value the money in your wallet you should never order an arby's medium fry or that the kool-aid man is an official marvel hero with deep ties into the x-men or or that movie theater popcorn is like the most valuable food in the world we're also doing things like coming to the definitive answer about some of the food world's biggest debates like whether a hot dog is a sandwich or not spoiler alert pizza and chicken wings might qualify too anyway this is a channel that is literally built on the principle of brain food so if you like what we do here i guarantee that you'll enjoy food theory as well so please head on over to that channel right now and hit subscribe it is without exaggeration the single best way that you can help this channel out right now and let's be honest it's not like youtube is gonna show you new videos on your feet anyway so really there's no reason not to just helps people take this channel more seriously anyway thank you thank you for considering watching thank you for your support over there thank you most of all for your subscription in a really sucky year working on this new channel has been a really great change of pace for all us on theorist team but what would be really really great is seeing that you guys are out there excited about it supporting it so please help in any way that you can link to that channel as well as its first couple of episodes are in the top lines of the description alright alright enough shilling let's talk batman we're more accurately the joker under normal world circumstances this is the time of year that i get most excited about movies it's when all the studios pull out their biggest franchises and just create a summer blockbuster season full of weekend after weekend of killer films sure they might not always be great um suicide squad dark phoenix but they are always fun to go and see and certainly fun to talk about but the lack of new summer movies this year has gotten me to try and recreate that excitement at home by re-watching some of my all-time favorite superhero films starting of course with the christopher nolan batman films just so i had an excuse to watch dark knight again it is so great i don't tend to re-watch movies a whole lot but dark knight is one that i just always gravitate back to i know that we have so many amazing superhero films these days but man this one still holds up with so many iconic scenes the opening heist the pencil magic trick the hospital explosion but this time one scene in particular really caught my attention the money pyramid i never really stopped to think about it but that is a huge huge pile of cash that the joker has as we learn about the movie it's some combination of his various heist earnings as well as half the collective income of the gotham mafia and then the joker just you know goes and sets it all on fire and all of it just to prove a point so what i want to figure out today is just how expensive that point really was how much money is in that gigantic stack of cash of his how much work would it take to set up and most importantly of all what does it tell us about the true nature of this character because tell you what despite the joker appearing like this chaotic force the money pyramid scene proves that he's anything but so in order to calculate how much money the joker's sitting on top of we have to get a sense of the pyramid's general dimensions from some of the wide shots at the beginning of the scene we see that the pyramid is composed of 10 separate tiers each tier roughly the same height if you zoom in on the highest resolution and count you'll see that the height of each tier is about 30 straps of cash hi now i'm assuming that this whole pile is made of hundred dollar bills for several reasons during the initial robbery i saw that they were only stealing ten thousand dollar straps of cash also when doing the research i came across the movie props of this particular scene which are all hundred dollar bills so knowing that ten thousand dollars is one hundred one hundred dollar bills we take the thickness of one bill 0.0043 inches or 0.01 centimeters and then multiply by 100 to get the height of a single stack that gives us 0.43 inches or a little over one centimeter 30 of those stacked on top of each other is going to get us just under 13 inches or around 33 centimeters so each tier is slightly over a foot high meaning that the whole pyramid of 10 tiers is 10 feet 9 inches or about 3.3 meters high we can also gut check this number by seeing the joker standing at both the top and bottom of the pile heath ledger the actor who played the joker was just over six foot tall meaning that the tower should be roughly twice his height a little bit less and yeah that looks about right for reference that makes joker's money pile approximately the same height as stonehenge except much cooler because it's literally comprised of money as opposed to rocks that aliens decided to throw together for no apparent reason so that's the height but what about the width well width in this case is also pretty easy all we have to do again is count the straps of cash once we do that knowing that a typical hundred dollar bill is six inches long or 15 centimeters long we can calculate the width of each tier going up which starts at about 20 feet or six meters at its base and step by step gets smaller and smaller 18 feet 16 feet 14 feet 12 11 10 9 8 and finally seven all of which i've marked on screen for you and with those dimensions out of the way we can finally start to figure out how much cash is actually in this thing let's start with the bottom shall we since the process is the same all the way up the pyramid based on our counting as well as the dimensions of a hundred dollar bill the bottom tier is made of 39 stacks of cash long and 92 stacks of cash wide this means that there are 107 640 stacks of cash on this bottom tier alone all of which are ten thousand dollars a piece that is one billion dollars 1 billion 76 million 400 000 to be exact and that is only for the first level of the pyramid joker is a billionaire and we've barely gotten off the ground in a literal and figurative sense now this number seemed way too big for me so i tried it a different way we know that the bottom level is roughly 20 foot by 20 foot and we know the height of that bottom level so i calculated the volume of that which ended up being about 748 800 cubic inches and divided by the volume of a single hundred dollar bill which is about point zero six eight nine cubic inches to see how many bills would be needed to fill that bottom tier's volume the results nearly 11 million hundred dollar bills meaning that again the total amount of cash is roughly around 1.1 billion dollars after doing that same process nine more times for the rest of the pyramid i concluded the final result to be 468 000 straps of cash creating the eye-watering grand total of 4 billion 688 million dollars two-bit whack job wears a cheap purple suit and makeup the suit it wasn't cheap you ought to know you bought it that puts the joker no joke into the top hundred richest people in the u.s right now alongside oprah winfrey that's right next time you're hanging out with your comics buddies quiz em on what the joker has in common with oprah bet they're not gonna guess that one now could there be some wooden structure underneath like how they display fruit in a grocery store sure maybe but i'm not convinced that there is look at when the joker slides down the pyramid there are stacks of cash deep within this structure plus consider the weight of all this money that amount of cash would weigh 51 tons a hundred and two thousand pounds of pure money no street goons are gonna be able to run down to the local home depot and architect together something to hold that amount of weight so quickly i think it's gotta be pure cash but as you can imagine i was still skeptical as i have no doubt you are too that is an insane amount of money and i've learned from doing these episodes for nearly 10 years that sometimes my math yields numbers that if i don't gut check them get me burned in the comments except here's the thing the reality of this situation holds firm let's start by covering how he acquired the billions of dollars in the first place since the joker is stealing from the gotham mafia and various crime organizations the number isn't as far-fetched as it might seem in 2002 the mafia in the usa brought in 50 to 90 billion dollars per year and in italy in 2008 the family there was earning an estimated 250 million euros per day via their various businesses man that was a sentence with a lot of air quotes anyway gotham is a major city in the u.s so it's not unbelievable that the ruling crime families would have billions spread out across the city the thing that seals the deal though is their accountant lao when the joker crashes in on the major gotham gangsters we learn that lau their accountant has moved all of their money together to avoid the cash getting seized by harvey dent this means that billions of dollars are suddenly in one location and lao is conveniently the only one who knows where all of that cash is stashed it's also worth noting that lao refers to the 68 million dollars that the joker stole in the opening scene of the movie as relatively small as you're all aware one of our deposits was stolen a relatively small amount 68 million and no one has a big reaction to this number being dropped which makes it seem like it's mere chump change lastly we get that shot of an 18-wheeler truck that's loaded to the brim with large bags of cash if the first robbery of the movie netted 68 million dollars in hundred dollar bills and it looked like this an 18-wheeler full of bags stuffed with hundred dollar bills would easily be totaling in the billions so the joker's a billionaire throws it all away but that's to be expected right this is a guy who thrives on chaos he famously describes himself as the man with no plan so none of this should really come as a big surprise right do i really look like a guy with a plan you know what i am i'm a dog chasing cars you know i just do things except that couldn't be further from the truth don't trust what a person says about themselves especially when the person is a mysterious psychopath and a purple jacket throughout the dark night the joker skulks around gotham and continually tells people he meets about his origin story and his love of chaos but look at his actions and you see that he is anything but chaotic he storms into the mafia meeting prepared with a pencil and grenades he gets captured on purpose and installs cell phones into his henchmen's chests just to blow him up at the perfect moment so he can escape with lao he arranges that opening heist with such pinpoint timing that a bus bursts through the bank wall at precisely the time he planned over and over and over throughout this movie we're presented with the classic look at me i'm insane but reading between the lines it's immediately obvious that it's all an act and the money pyramid is the best example of this because this scene isn't just about a massive stack of cash it's about a massive amount of time precision and organization arranging the money in a pyramid like this is not easy as we see the money is being kept in loose sacks so it's up to the henchmen to piece it all together and time is against them after the joker escapes from the police department the sun is rising and we see batman brooding over the still-burning remains of the factory where rachel died he drops off dense coin at the hospital later that day then he goes back to his penthouse and mourns the loss of rachel the next day gordon visits dent in the hospital and we cut to cars pulling up to the boatyard with the sun directly above them so we know the goons had between 12 and 36 hours max to build this thing assuming that the joker has 16 henchmen working on it all laying down 60 straps of cash per minute say one per second which is already assuming a lot to lay down over a hundred thousand straps of cash for just the first tier alone you're looking at two hours of solid work and that is the easy layer from that point forward you're either climbing on the work that you've already done or you're using heavy machinery like forklifts and cherry pickers which is just gonna slow down the entire process the website movies films and flicks estimates that it took 16 henchmen 27 hours in total to construct that giant pyramid around the clock day of work to build this thing and for what he literally builds an 11 foot tall pyramid of cash so that one person can see it burn the whole scene is so precisely practiced that the joker only needs to say the word gasoline and his henchmen know exactly what to do none of this is chaotic i enjoy dynamite gasoline all of it is rehearsed it's all a theater show a carefully crafted set to make a point it's excessive but more than anything else it goes against everything that he says about himself in the film he is the most organized organized criminal of them all and that is why we've spent so much time on a topic that literally no one was asking about to show you the true nature of the joker but hey that's just a theory a film theory and you know who's an even bigger comic villain than the joker kool-aid man oh yeah that's right step aside superman batman splash man and not man it's all about the kool-aid man today i'm doing a collaboration with myself and my new channel food theory where one of the episodes that i've uploaded today covers how kool-aid man is connected to the x-men and how he might be able to find his way into the marvel cinematic universe it's one of five more theory episodes that i'm launching with today so if you want more theory action go over to food theory and check it out and while you're there be one of our first subscribers to the newest channel now's your chance hopefully when the channel gets big one day you'll be able to go back and say hey i was there on day one watching those videos and subscribing is literally the single best thing that you could do for the channel right now so if you do find yourself with a little bit of extra time today check out kool-aid man and then lick that red subscribe button that you see on screen it makes all the difference in the world to us working on the channel and literally zero difference to your youtube watch page since we all know that youtube don't actually show you the channels that you subscribe to but the numbers actually help us prove legitimacy of the channel so that's why i'm asking for your help anyway let's make this thing a success together shall we thank you for your help i'm so excited to start this new journey with you where we can just nerd out even more together as a community and welcome to the food theory family i'll see you all next week across all three channels and until then bon appetit

Channel: The Film Theorists

Views: 4,376,292

Keywords: joker, batman, the joker, the dark night, batman the dark knight, dark knight, heath ledger joker, heath ledger, nolan, christopher nolan, joker trailer, trailer joker, joker 2019, joker ending, joker ending explained, joker explained, joker movie, ending explained joker, joker theory, batman theory, tdk, joker is the hero, joker the hero, gotham, dc, film theorists, film theory, matpat, matpat joker, film theory joker

Id: vjPcIh1fVNg

Length: 15min 56sec (956 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 23 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Vryly]

i thought you were gonna go further with this point. One of the things that gets pointed out is how batman's best villains all invert some part of his own character. Poison ivy is also a vigilante, but in the interests in a type of justice somewhat more harmful to the status quo. Two face is an exaggeration of bat man's duality, in identity, and between justice and crime. The penguin is a rich weirdo with a pile of animal themed gadgets.

Joker i always interpreted through this lens as showing that bruce is actually a lunatic who likes to dress up in a funny costume, and go out into the night and get into serious fights with dudes.

So i saw the title to this vid and was like, oh damn, he's got the secret theory that shows joker is secretly some reclusive warren buffet type billionaire when he's not pretending to be a killer clown, and i was like; damn that would be perfect for the joker's character. Like, thats the one secret origin i think i could get behind, if he was basically exactly the same as bruce wayne, except instead of deciding to fight the criminal world when his parents were tragically murdered he decided to embrace the madness.

Also it would have been worth pointing out in the video that even if the stack was made of twenties it would still be almost a billion dollars being burned. Assuming it was all from robberies i think you could expect some mixed bills in there, but with twenties and hundreds dominating. Even if the stacks are of every bill type up to 100, in even proportions, the stack is still worth well over a billion

[u/Rich_Performance_651]

I love this channel and my favorite villain is the joker could you do other dc and marvel villain thoerys