Matt Reeves’ aggressive expansion of his Batman universe is being tempered despite the growing success of The Batman.
One door may be closing as the director announced on the Happy, Sad, Confused podcast that he is no longer pursuing Gotham PD which pitched a tent at HBO Max all the way back in 2020.
“One thing that we’re not doing that I was gonna do… So, there’s the Gotham police show, which, that one actually is put on hold. We’re not really doing that,” he said.
The show, which never had an official title and sounded similar to Gotham (still fresh in people’s minds), ran into trouble early on. Originally headed up by executive producer Terence Winter (Boardwalk Empire), he bailed out over creative differences months after development began.
Comparing it to Sidney Lumet’s Prince of the City, Reeves described the would-be series as a prequel to The Batman about a dirty cop in “year one” of Gotham City. It “wasn’t going to be a Batman story” but we would’ve seen the beginnings of his alliance with Jim Gordon.
That doesn’t mean the ideas intended for the show are going away. We may see them play out, after all, because plans shifted and Reeves is pouring his energy into an Arkham series.
“The GCDP thing, that story has kinda evolved,” he said on The Cyber Nerds YouTube show. “We’ve actually now [moved] more into the realm of exactly what would happen in the world of Arkham as it relates coming off of our movie, and some of the characters… almost leaning into the idea of… it’s like a horror movie or a haunted house that is Arkham.”
He added, “The idea, again the way that Gotham is a character in the movie, I really want Arkham to exist as a character. You go into this environment and encounter these characters in a way that feels really fresh.”
How Arkham affected the plans for the Gotham PD series, Reeves explained, “And so in our work on Gotham, that story started to evolve, and it started feeling [like], ‘Wait, we should really lean into this.’ And then that’s kinda where that’s gone.”
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He might not be telling the origin of police corruption anymore but Reeves is still interested in showing Penguin’s rise to power in the HBO Max series starring Colin Farrell that’s still on.
The director told Entertainment Weekly he sees Penguin’s story as “this kind of ‘American dream in Gotham’ sort of story, almost like Scarface; the rise of this character who we all know will achieve mythic status.”
But we all better watch out because Reeves warns “He [Penguin] is underestimated and he’s like a time bomb…”
Does that sound like a Penguin you’re used to? What about Arkham? Tell us if you are intrigued by either of these ideas down below.
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