When The Batman’s director, Matt Reeves struck out to deliver his unique vision of a beloved character and universe, he did so with a trilogy in mind. And, when audiences picked up everything the filmmaker put down in his 2022 movie, he and the top dogs at Warner Bros. began to think outside the box — or rather — off the big screen and onto the small. On September 19, fans will see the fruits of their labor as The Batman spin-off series, The Penguin, will arrive on Max. During a conversation with Collider’s Steve Weintraub, Reeves revealed how the series came to be and what legendary gangster film he kept in mind during the early stages of the creative process.
Whether it be through film or television, Reeves said:
“I had always intended to continue Penguin’s story and wanted to tell this kind of story of his beginning of rise to power because we know that he’s introduced in
The Batman
as a kind of mid-level sort of overlooked mocked figure who’s not anywhere yet to being, to becoming the kingpin that we come to know him as in the lore.”
As anyone who’s seen The Batman will know, Reeves stayed away from the titular character’s origin story and, instead, threw audiences into perhaps the darkest version of Gotham we’ve ever seen. Crime, chaos, and corruption are abundant and Robert Pattinson’s Bruce Wayne is battling his own internal demons. Although the trilogy was never going to be about Batman’s backstory, Reeves said that he found himself more compelled to shed light on how the movie’s villains became who they are.
“Whereas it wasn’t Batman’s origin story,
I wanted the origin stories of these other characters of the Rogues Gallery
. And that story was initially what was going to be the entrée into the next movie. And then when we were talking about this kind of what I call The Batman Epic Crime Saga, and we’re talking to
Casey Bloys
and
Sarah Aubrey
about it, we were talking about these different aspects of the show and what we wanted to do. And one of the things that Casey said was he goes, ‘I’m really excited about what you’re doing in the movies. We’d love you to do something in the series that’s like with one of these marquee characters. Don’t hoard, don’t save everything just for the theatrical experience.’And I said, ‘Well, let me tell you what I wanted to do as the next sort of leg of this story as an entrée into the next movie.’ I wanted to do, basically,
in the wake of what’s happened at the end of the first movie
, Carmine Falcone is dead. He’s had power for 20 years and now in the power vacuum as Selena says to him, it’s gonna get bloody. And this is the moment where as Rob is as, as Batman is narrating at the end of the movie, like some people will take, seize the chance to grab anything they can. And that is Oz.”
Matt Reeves Compares Penguin to One of Cinema’s Most Iconic Gangsters
We know Penguin to be a ruthlessly cold and calculated gangster and a top player in the criminal underbelly of Gotham. For Reeves, he envisioned his version of the character to have a sort of rags-to-riches story similar to the one that Al Pacino’s character, Tony Montana, experienced in Brian De Palma’s classic feature, Scarface. Reeves told Collider:
“It was kind of like imagining almost for that story, an aspect of it kind of almost like a
Scarface
story like a gangster story. And Casey was like, ‘That’s the series we want, we want that series’… The idea was to pull that out and to basically find a way to tell that story and have it begin a week after the movie and then tell the beginning of him
beginning this journey toward becoming the kingpin
and then ending that story as it related to where we wanted to tell what was going to be the main story for
The Batman: Part Two
which
Mattson
[
Tomlin
] and I are now writing.”
Pick up with Oz Cobb following the events of The Batman when The Penguin comes to Max on September 19. Look for more from our exclusive interview with Matt Reeves soon.
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