The Gotham City police-centric spin-off of “The Batman” is apparently stalled, according to “The Batman” director Matt Reeves, who was attached to executive produce.
During an appearance on the “Happy, Sad, Confused” podcast, Reeves confessed that the show has been “put on hold,” perhaps indefinitely.
“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,” Reeves said. “We’re not really doing that.”
That said, Reeves also revealed what he wanted the series to be, comparing it to one of director Sidney Lumet’s films. According to him, it would’ve centered on Robert Pattinson’s Bruce Wayne in his first year of being the caped crusader.
“The series was going to be kind of like ‘Prince of the City,’ where it was going to be year one,” Reeves continued. “Because the movie is year two, and I wanted it to be the first appearance. But 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 [Bruce] 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 his soul.”
Reeves noted that he was super excited about the idea, but HBO Max and Warner Brothers wanted something a bit different.
“It’s super cool to me. And they didn’t not like the idea,” he explained. “They just wanted it to be, they wanted to center a show on a character who was more — I get it. And so I was like, OK. So maybe someday we’ll do that show.”
An HBO Max series revolving around Colin Farrell’s Penguin character, which would be a sequel to “The Batman,” is currently in development.
An individual with knowledge of the situation confirms to TheWrap that the Gotham PD show hasn’t been put to a complete halt, but has “evolved” into a different concept. That concept, as Reeves outlined to The Cyber Nerds, is something revolving around Arkham Asylum.
“The GCPD thing, that story has kinda evolved,” said Reeves. “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 and their origins… almost leaning into the idea of… it’s like a horror movie or a haunted house that is Arkham. 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. 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.”
An earlier version of this story said that the Gotham PD series was “on hold” but has since been updated to reflect the concept’s evolution.
