‘Tulsa King’ Showrunner Terence Winter Reveals The Gotham PD Series Set In ‘The Batman‘ Continuity Was Going To Be A 70s Police Drama
Terence Winter, the original head writer of the spinoff covering the beginnings of police corruption seen in The Batman, is finally divulging what he had in mind for that canceled project.
The series would have taken a hard look at Gotham City across three generations of cops in an homage to hard boiled shows similar to Life on Mars that have a groovy sense of nostalgia. “The idea was that we were going to do a 1970s cop show – something that felt like ‘Prince of the City’ but in the Gotham City Police Department,” Winter explained to The Playlist’s Bingeworthy podcast.
“It was going to be a present day cop who is like a third generation Gotham City cop, his grandfather, his dad, and Gotham City was largely corrupt. And this is our guy who we meet in the present day, who’s realizing that he’s kind of on the wrong side,” he continued.
“The Batman was somebody that kind of lived in that world, but you never really saw him. And it was really all about the police department and sort of this guy,” he said. But The Batman director and series executive producer Matt Reeves was not impressed and decided to recalibrate.
“And I worked on it for a while. And ultimately, Matt [Reeves] wasn’t feeling it. And I left,” Winter recalls succinctly. He was replaced by Joe Barton of The Lazarus Project, but the project still went nowhere. It would be folded into the Arkham series that was later incorporated into the DCU briefly. That too was shelved in the end.
The Penguin stands alone as the only new installment and expansion of the proverbial Bat-Verse until The Batman – Part 2 rolls film to reach its release date in October of 2026. Terence Winter moved on and is doing fairly well for himself these days as the showrunner of Paramount Plus hit Tulsa King.
NEXT: Matt Reeves Is Still Aiming For A Grounded ‘The Batman’ Trilogy, Which Means No Gentleman Ghost
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