The director of The Batman, Matt Reeves, has revealed a few details about scrapped plans for expanding his take on Gotham City.
There are parts of Gotham City that film fans have seen many, many times. Wayne Manor, Crime Alley, those sunny Californian roads from the Adam West version.
Okay, maybe not the last one so much but you get the point. Taking inspiration from Frank Miller’s incredible Batman: Year One comics, Matt Reeves crafted a Gotham City that felt like it was in greater thrall to organised crime that any we’ve seen previously. The film – The Batman – was a sizeable hit for Warner Bros, successfully reigniting the Batman franchise.
Reeves was keen to expand on that idea by exploring corners of Gotham in greater detail. There’s The Penguin series, coming out in September but at least two other series have been (kind of) announced and then scrapped. One was a Gotham City Police Department show and the other was a series set in Arkham Asylum.
Reeves has been chatting to EW, and touched upon what the shows were conceived to be and why they didn’t happen. (Spoiler: it’s a very Warner Bros reason.)
Says Reeves, “as we were writing The Batman, I was like, ‘Hey, you know what? I think there are some cool shows that we could do. It was actually why I wanted to make our deal at Warner Bros. It wasn’t going to be a Batman story, it was going about about this corrupt cop. And it was going to be about how the worst gang in Gotham were the GCPD. And [the cop] was going to come across paths, he would have touched paths with Gordon who would have been – it would have been someone to measure him against. But it would be a battle for [the cop’s] soul.”
Sounds good? Not good enough for the studio who never fully got behind it – even though Warner Bros needs prestige programming to service its Max streaming platform.
When Reeves instead pivoted to a show set in Arkham Asylum (presumably featuring all kinds of Batman villains), the studio still didn’t give the go-ahead: “They were like, we like what you’re doing, and we want to lean harder into the marquee characters,” recalls Reeves.
We’re not sure how the filmmaker is supposed to win here. If by ‘marquee’ characters, the studio means ‘characters that have already appeared in Reeves’ film so audiences can’t help but recognise them, then it has The Penguin on the way. Still, the thought of an Arkham Asylum show, or a GCPD show riffing on some more of those Seven vibes that The Batman referenced is an enticing prospect.
The latter idea is said to have found its way into The Penguin in some form so there’s that. The show will act as a bridge between The Batman and its sequel, currently in pre-production. Let’s hope Reeves has remembered to put some ‘marquee’ names in that project, lest he face even more notes from Warner Bros executives.
