Things are always going on over with the DC movies, particularly as they pertain to Batman. While The Penguin is finally set to drop next week, a longer-than-expected wait for The Batman Part II (thanks to Covid and labor strikes) has some folks feeling antsy that Matt Reeves won’t get to do everything he’s apparently setting out to do.
But according to Reeves himself, folks got nothing to worry about. In a recent interview with Collider, he assured that his Batman saga will get to play out in full, and it’s sticking “very closely to the path we envisioned.” Thus far, the biggest deviation came in the form of The Penguin: he always knew he wanted to continue the future crime lord’s story and the “beginning of his rise to power.” But instead of letting Oswald’s story be an “entree” into Part II, it grew into its own thing, partially out of a desire to not relegate Reeves’ plans just for theaters.
Reeves recalled how HBO’s chief content officer Casey Bloys initially told him they wanted “something in the series that’s like one of these marquee characters, don’t horde, don’t save everything just for the theatrical experience.” He settled on Penguin since in that first film, he appears “as a kind of mid-level, sort of overlooked, mocked figure, who’s not yet in anyone’s eyes the kingpin we come to know him as in the lore. That was deliberate because I wanted—whereas it wasn’t Batman’s origin story, I wanted the origin stories of these other characters.”
What “other characters” could Reeves mean? He was tight-lipped, though a recent roundtable covered by The Direct offers a tiny hint. During that, producer Dylan Clark indicated another spinoff was in the works, one seemingly different from the Arkham Asylum-set one shelved this past July. One journalist reportedly asked if a legal drama starring Harvey Dent was up for consideration, to which Reeves said that question was “thinking certainly in the way that our conversations have gone.”
What Batman villain do you think would be a good TV fit for The Batman’s grounded universe? Let us know in the comments below.
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