Matt Reeves Wants to Avoid Franchise Fatigue with an HBO-Style Show About a Gangster

You do not have to watch "The Penguin" to understand the "Batman" movie sequel, and that's by design. Matt Reeves tells IndieWire all about the choices that shaped the HBO show.

When director Matt Reeves was writing “The Batman,” and effectively taking the franchise reigns with what was expected to be the first of a trilogy of films featuring Robert Pattinson as the caped crusader, he knew he wanted his Gotham to be a more grounded cinematic world. Inspired by the tone of Frank Miller’s comicbook series “Batman: Year One,” in which the chaotic real world of 1970s New York was a recognizable underpinning, Reeves wanted his Gotham to be recognizable to a modern audience — a direct reflection of our own broken and divisive times. That tone, more so than interlocking narrative, would be the glue.

It’s a vision Reeves had always imagined could neatly spin-off into an HBO-like series, especially when switching out of Batman’s point-of-view in the movies, and exploring the world through the eyes of one of the Rogues Gallery villains.

“They are, even more than Batman, consumed with a kind of darkness,” said Reeves while a guest on an upcoming episode of the Toolkit podcast. “When you’re in an HBO series, it allows for a kind of frankness that you can’t do in a PG-13 movie. To me, what’s exciting is the idea of exploring these characters with the tone and the way that HBO has done with their crime shows.”

But when Reeves broached the idea of an HBO series with the former executives at DC Comics, he was told the superhero banner didn’t have that kind of synergistic relationship with the premium streamer despite being part of the same corporation. The media landscape though would radically shift by 2020, when Reeves would look for a new TV home after his overall deal at Twentieth Century Fox TV expired, and Warner Media was launching HBO Max and actively looking to expand its big movie franchises into television.

“[HBO executives] Casey Bloys and Sarah Aubrey were like, ‘Oh, we would love to do that,’” said Reeves, who moved his Idaho & 6th production shingle over to WBD. “Casey said, ‘Hey, I want to make sure you’re not reserving your marquee characters just for theatrical.”

It’s a note that would register down the road, as Reeves and executive producer Dylan Clark would eventually abandon previously announced TV projects about the Gotham Police Department and Arkham Asylum for the Criminally Insane. As for Colin Farrell’s Penguin, Reeves already had set movie-related plans, which didn’t make him a candidate for a TV series.

From the start, Reeves’ conception of the Penguin veered significantly from the previous versions of the villian. He wouldn’t be a wealthy Cobblepot with a silver spoon (his is now Oswalsd “Oz” Cobbs), but instead from the working class neighborhood of Crowne Point, growing up on the other side of the river staring over at Gotham.

“What if we meet somebody who’s more like somebody at the beginning of like a Scarface story. Someone who is underestimated,” said Reeves. “Them calling him ‘The Penguin,’ that’s kind of a joke, they’re mocking him. Nobody sees what he feels inside, which is that one day this city can be his.”

In retrospect, he is a character tailor-made to explore in a similar fashion to how David Chase did Tony Soprano, but Reeves was focused on the villian’s arc as it related to “The Batman 2” sequel.

In “The Batman,” Farrell’s Penguin is a macguffin, Reeves wants you to think Carmine Falcone’s ambitious lackey is the stool pigeon the Riddler (Paul Dano) is threatening to reveal — when in reality, it was Falcone (John Turturo in “The Batman,” Mark Strong in “The Penguin” flashbacks) himself, the man who it turns out was able to rule Gotham for 20 years in part by selling out his competition to law enforcement (Reeves drawing inspiration from mobster Whitey Bulger’s real life story).

At the end of “The Batman,” when Falcone is murdered and Riddler floods the city, it creates the dangerous combination of chaos and a power vacuum. Batman himself would be too busy saving lives and helping the city dig out to focus on the ensuing internal gang war. It was the perfect conditions for the ruthless and wily Penguin to make his play from middle management to becoming the new boss. How “The Batman” would transition into the sequel was always clear in Reeves’ head. He more than tips his hand at the end of the first film, cutting to Farrell’s Penguin lurking in shadows as Batman discusses those who will take advantage of the flood and Falcone’s death.

“The plan was always to continue Oz’s story and I was really excited. The genesis of Penguin was always my intention to be in the beginning of the next movie,” said Reeves. “While I was writing the script, I kept thinking there was a point where the script got so long and I was like, ‘Gosh, you know, maybe this is an HBO series?’”

What was intended to be the opening of the movie sequel had the potential to be a series. Said Reeves, “And so I pitched what that was to Casey and he was like, ‘That’s the show. We want to do that show.’” Still in post-production on “The Batman,” Reeves was realistic that he’d need to hire a writer, Lauren LeFranc, to build out the world of The Penguin and create a supporting cast. LeFranc would be tasked with creating a richer backstory for the character, who showed signs of being incapable of love and broken in a way that fed his unsatiable ambition.

“If we’re going to do a kind of Scarface story, a kind of dark American dream story, the point of it is to do it in this HBO way of a character study. We need to look into that character to understand the darkness that’s in him that makes him so ruthless and where this comes from. That brokenness that makes somebody go to any lengths,” said Reeves. “That’s part of the wish fulfillment of a gangster story, is somebody’s unleashed, but then seeing the consequences of that and then going further and looking into the darkness of that.”

And while Reeves said he was prescriptive of how LeFranc entered and exited the world of Gotham in the eight-episode series, which takes place between “The Batman” and the yet-to-be-filmmed sequel, the stories are not co-dependent. Reeves is clear, people will not have to watch “The Penguin” to understand “The Batman 2,” and that’s by design.

“I think one of the things about what comic book movies have become is that there’s so much oversaturation that I think that sometimes somewhere along the way, there starts to be an expectation [of story crossover],” said Reeves, who made clear he believes audiences can tire from too much interlocking narratives.

Describing the approach to “The Penguin,” “It’s not like, ‘OK, this is all just one story. And guess what? You got to tune in next week to see X, Y, and Z, because we’re going to do that in the movie.’ So that when you see ‘The Batman’ [that] is a complete story, ‘The Penguin’ is a complete story, ‘The Batman 2’ will be a complete story,” Reeves said. “When you watch them together, there is a sweep and a breadth that deepens the experience and is a meditation on Gotham, and these characters within it, and I think in that sense that’s how I’m hoping we’re doing something that wouldn’t tire the audience because for me, I think what it does is it respects the audience.”

What Reeves likes about the ability to do an HBO show is that it allows for freshness. Whereas “The Batman” was modeled after serial killer and detective stories like “Se7en” and “Chinatown” and had a Batman-like point of view looking down on Gotham from above, “The Penguin” is a street-level gangster picture with a handheld “French Connection” aesthetic that better reflects its central figure.

“[The HBO series] allows us to do something different,” said Reeves. “It all adds to this epic sort of saga, but you’re able to then suddenly switch points of view, we’re switching genres, and so I think that it allows for there to be freshness of point of view.”