We’re currently five episodes into The Penguin‘s run on HBO, with the villain-focused The Batman spin-off—which stars Colin Farrell and his various facial lumps as they wage a desperate underdog battle to not get completely blown off the screen by Cristin Milioti—generating strong numbers for the network. (The most recent episode brought in 1.8 million viewers last Sunday; not House Of The Dragon numbers, but still a strong showing.) Now, The Batman‘s own Matt Reeves has said he wants more spin-offs set in his rust-dusted version of Gotham City, which, we take no joy in reporting, he apparently refers to in interviews as the “Epic Batman Crime Saga.”
Reeves was talking to The Wrap about the HBO show, which he serves as an executive producer on. (He was originally also supposed to direct some of its episodes, but scheduling conflicts and producing duties got in the way.) Reeves makes it clear he’s always had expansive views on his take on The Batman, having apparently briefly pitched the film itself as “an HBO series – Batman: Year Two.“ (He says Warner Bros. execs told him at the time “We have nothing to do with HBO.”) Later, he pitched HBO’s Casey Bloys on a pair of shows that would have looked at Gotham from ground-floor perspectives, with shows about a rare non-crooked cop and one set in Arkham Asylum, and basically got told to stop focusing on the scrubs. “As we were doing it, there was a point where Casey Bloys said, ‘Look, I just want to make sure you aren’t saving the marquee characters for the theatrical experience. This is HBO.’ And I said, ‘Oh.’” (Both shows, while briefly announced with folks like Terence Winter and Antonio Campos attached, have since been binned.) And so a series focused on Farrell’s character, Gotham gangster Oz Cobb, was born.
Reeves is clearly pretty happy with The Penguin, which uses its eight episodes to perform what Reeves called a “a long-form, deep-dive into Oz’s character” that ultimately seems to be amounting to “Big honkin’ mommy issues.” The director didn’t directly comment on the idea of Cobb himself getting a second season—Farrell himself sounds pretty sick of wearing his various prosthetics—but did make it clear that he wants more shows set within the, uh, Saga. “I can tell you this, we would love to be able to do more. But I can also say that we are already talking to HBO about [more]. The opportunity of being able to then on HBO, go and explore characters that wouldn’t be able to have that kind of real estate creatively, as we were able to do with Oz, that is something that we are talking to HBO about. They’re very excited about that idea. That’s something that we really, really hope we’re going to be able to do.”
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