While director Matt Reeves was developing “The Batman,” his epic superhero movie starring Robert Pattinson as the Dark Knight, he ran into a problem — he had too much story.
At the time, the filmmaker asked Warner Bros. if perhaps they would instead want a miniseries. “What could be really cool is an HBO series – ‘Batman: Year Two,’ solving this crime,” Reeves remembered telling his executives. What he was told in response was, “We have nothing to do with HBO.”
But as Reeves was finishing the script for “The Batman” and gearing up for production, he met with WBD and said, “Look, I know these things are connected, but it’d be really exciting to do an HBO show where you can investigate these characters in a way that HBO would,” Reeves recalled to TheWrap. “And they were like, ‘We want to do exactly that.’ And suddenly there was this moment where things were going to change.”
The synergistic Warner Bros. Discovery machine rumbled to life.
Several different ideas were explored: One would follow a morally just Gotham City cop in a largely corrupt system (meant to be executive produced by Terence Winter); another was about Arkham Asylum (with Antonio Campos attached as director and executive producer). “As we were doing it, there was a point where [HBO CEO] 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.’”
Reeves pitched what he had planned for the beginning of “The Batman Part II,” continuing the story of Oswald Cobb (an unrecognizable Colin Ferrell), one of the big villains from “The Batman.” Reeves remembered telling Bloys, “I want to do it in the moment after the movie where there’s this power vacuum. Carmine Falcone has controlled the city for the last 20 years and now he’s dead. And here’s this guy who has been overlooked, underestimated, mocked and yet within him is this animalistic ambition. I said, ‘I want to do this thing where you see him grabbing for power and the chaos that he creates.’ It’s the beginning of him becoming that legend.”
According to Reeves, “The Batman” wasn’t an origin story for the Caped Crusader. It was more of an origin story for Batman’s rogues gallery. With this show, “We can do the origin of how Oz is the person who reaches for power in this way – why and how he becomes the kingpin,” the series executive producer shared. By the time Reeves was done with the call, Bloys was saying, “That’s it. That’s the show. That’s the show that we’re doing.”
“It was at that point that it really clicked into place,” Reeves said.
Lauren LeFranc was then hired to develop and run the show. Reeves remembered saying, “We want to go on this exploration where we have this guy who’s got this deep voice inside of him that makes him the way that he is.” If Reeves’ “Batman” movie was “a mystery, a noir, a series killer movie,” the team got excited that “we could not only change point of view, but in a way change genre.” “The Penguin” would be like “Scarface,” “A gangster story where you’re seeing this guy grabbing for power in a way that is his origin tale.” LeFranc went away, did a deep dive on the character (who throughout the years has been played by everybody from Burgess Meredith to Danny DeVito) and returned with a version of why the character was as “messed up as he was.”
At the same time as he was developing the series, Reeves was also working on the second movie (which will also feature Ferrell’s Penguin). “It’s this thing where you’re trying to organize it in such a way that the movie hands off to the show. We change point-of-view. We do something we can’t have any room really to do at this level in the movies, go on a long-form, deep-dive into Oz’s character, but then hand back off to the next movie and have him enter that story,” he explained. “There was a little bit of air traffic control to manage that, but all of it was to create the space then that would allow us to dig deeply into that character in the way that Lauren did.”
And while there was initially talks of Reeves directing some of the series, he said there was just too much for him to do as an EP, while also attempting to ready his second “Batman” movie. “If I were to do that, it would have stopped everything else that I needed to do. It became clear that that would affect everything else that we were doing in a way that wasn’t necessarily to the benefit of those projects,” Reeves said, referring also to the animated series, “Batman: Caped Crusader,” for Prime Video. “I would have loved to, but I had a different role in this, which was more producorial and that also is something that I love doing.”
During the development of “The Penguin,” James Gunn and Peter Safran were installed as the heads of the newly formed DC Studios. Not that it changed “The Penguin” all that much. “They were just totally supportive and super excited, and they read all the scripts and were part of the whole thing,” Reeves noted. His movies and television shows, he added, are somewhat immune to the larger, over-arching ethos of DC Studios. Reeves referred to his corner of the world as the Epic Batman Crime Saga, which, admittedly, is pretty cool.
When asked about his guiding principles for his Epic Batman Crime Saga, he said he remembered when he was writing the script for “The Batman” and, as a lifelong Batman fan, he started noticing what a prevalent figure the character was – he’d see people wearing T-shirts and hats emblazoned with the Batman symbol (when the 1989 movie came out, Batman logo paraphernalia was dubbed “kitsch of the year”). He once saw a woman pushing a baby down the street; the baby was wearing a Batman onesie.
“You’re like, Oh, it’s amazing how pervasive this is. This this is something that, for 85 years, has captured our imaginations. This character means something to people,” Reeves said. “For me, what was scary in doing that, was I loved this character, but I knew that you couldn’t just repeat what had already been done. The bar of entry is to find those characters that are beloved and to take them and respect what they are, so that people feel like they’re getting a bit of what they know and love, but then to find a way to do something personal and fresh with it, something that feels relevant, something that felt different.”
He continued, “I felt like that’s what I tried to do with ‘The Batman,’ and that’s certainly what we tried to do here too, which was to find a way to define this character in a way that relates to what people know of him, but is also new and personal.” Reeves also said that it’s not enough to just make a Batman project. Instead, you have to give the audience a compelling reason to come “that isn’t the same old thing … I think that’s the bar for me.”
That approach seems to be working.
As “The Penguin,” originally intended as a Max-exclusive, has aired weekly on HBO, it has racked up impressive numbers. The fifth episode hit a series-high of 1.8 million viewers across HBO and Max. In a landscape with precious few titles that are able to generate buzz on streaming and linear platforms while also provoking discussion on social media, “The Penguin” is an outlier. And it might be enough to have this limited series return for another go-around.
“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],” Reeves teased. “The Batman” and its upcoming sequel are so strongly focused on Batman’s point of view, Reeves would love to focus more on the villains. “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,” he explained. “They’re very excited about that idea. That’s something that we really, really hope we’re going to be able to do.”
After a pause, Reeves concluded: “We’ve got ‘The Batman. We’ve got ‘The Penguin.’ And who knows what’s next.”
“The Penguin” airs Sundays on HBO and streams on Max.
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