In case it wasn’t clear by now, HBO’s The Penguin is just a flat-out mob drama, superheroes be damned. Yes, despite featuring a famed Batman villain, the man is not shooting gas out of his umbrella, he’s a mobster trying to make it to the top of the food chain by killing and scamming other mobsters in the process. This is just…a mob story. And a good one.
The success of The Penguin seemingly abandoning any significant Batman connections besides periodically name-dropping The Riddler, responsible for the flooded city, sure makes it seem like HBO scrapping other spin-offs like a Gotham PD and Arkham show feel like the wrong call, in hindsight.
Here’s Matt Reeves talking about Gotham PD being shelved:
“It wasn’t going to be a Batman story, it was going about about this corrupt cop,” Reeves said. “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.”
“They were like, ‘We like what you’re doing, and we want to lean harder into the marquee characters,’” Reeves said, and relayed that some elements were put into The Penguin instead. Previously, he talked about the Arkham series which was supposed to feature elements of Sofia Falcone’s story, but again, that was moved into The Penguin, in part.
Given that The Penguin is working extremely well as a disconnected mob-drama, I have to believe that Reeves and his team could have made both an excellent cop show and an excellent prison show. Yes, The Penguin is a “marquee character” but this version barely resembles the traditional comic/movie version at all, outside of Colin Farrell packing on the pounds due to prosthetics and doing his waddle. It’s also easy to imagine how an Arkham show specifically could have featured a number of Batman villains, as there are dozens to choose from, even if the “big names” like Joker are likely being saved for the next films.
The good news is that there are more Batman spin-offs planned, at least one, and we’ll likely hear more about that soon enough. If The Penguin has shown anything it’s that WB and HBO should be supremely confident in whatever Reeves thinks is a good idea next.
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