After a legal battle between trans filmmaker Vera Drew and Warner Bros. Discovery, the former’s LGBTQ+ coming-of-age parody, The People’s Joker, is finally coming to the big screen. While it’s starting with a limited release in New York, the queer production company Altered Innocence plans on increasing its distribution to other regions in North America.

Drew’s parody tells the story of Joker the Harlequin (played by Drew herself), a “painfully unfunny aspiring clown” who struggles to make her mark in a dystopian, anti-comedy Gotham City. In this version of the DC universe, Joker fights back with her troupe of Batman villains, including the Penguin, Riddler, and Poison Ivy. In addition to fighting against a fascistic city and vigilante, Drew’s Joker grapples with her own gender identity and dysphoria.

The film was set to premiere at last year’s Toronto Film Festival. Still, Drew received a letter from Warner Bros. Discovery, who holds the rights for DC characters, to not screen the film publically. Drew was still allowed to screen the film at Toronto and other festivals, but most of its distribution plans had to be scrapped. She has maintained that her project was protected by fair use since the copyrighted characters were used for parody.

When developing the film, Drew utilized the DC characters and her experiences as a trans woman in the entertainment industry. The project became a collaboration of nearly 200 queer artists helping Drew “process what it was like coming out as a trans woman working in the film and TV industry.” With so much passion and effort put into the film, Drew was glad that the final result could find a home “among Altered Innocence’s catalog of gorgeously gay and deliciously edgy films.”

Drew and Altered Innocence have expressed their gratitude and excitement regarding People’s Joker, and they eagerly look forward to sharing this absurdist comedy with the rest of the world. Altered Innocence president Frank Jaffe proclaimed that Drew’s mash-up of styles created an entirely new genre of cinema that blurs the lines between documentary, coming-of-age film, and parody.” “We couldn’t be more thrilled to champion this bold, intelligent, and hilarious piece of queer cinema that audiences around the globe have fallen in love with,” Jaffe gushed.

The People’s Joker is set to be released at the IFC Center in New York on April 5th.